This modern history in sound of the Tonhalle begins in December 1942. On the podium is Volkmar Andreae, leading an urgent and sweetly songful Bruckner Seventh that’s consistent with his Vienna Symphony recording from a decade later, though also slightly compromised by unreliable brass intonation and a low hum at soft dynamics.

The narrative focus is established from the outset, presenting well-known combinations of artists and repertoire in duplications of commercially available accounts – but caught in concert, with all the attendant pros and cons. Musicians don’t always take more risks live than in the studio; sometimes they may fall back on a more limited vocabulary of larger, broader gestures designed to project to the back of the hall. More recent Bruckner evenings – the Fifth with Bernard Haitink (2009) and the Ninth with Herbert Blomstedt (2014) – were doubtless red letter days for the Tonhalle but they add little to already exhaustively documented interpretations.

Native music and musicians form an important subplot. A Bergian Fourth Symphony by Albert Moeschinger is conducted by Hans Rosbaud on disc 2; Schubert’s Third and Schumann’s Fourth are reinvented by Erich Schmid and Othmar Schoeck with the improvisatory freedom of true composer-conductors. From 1985, Schoeck’s Penthesilea opera is conducted by Gerd Albrecht with a cast, led by Helga Dernesch, that rivals without surpassing Albrecht’s 1982 Salzburg performance preserved by Orfeo (3/95).

The sole witness to Rudolf Kempe’s distinguished leadership of the Tonhalle is a stolid Beethoven Fifth recorded in 1968 at a gala to mark the orchestra’s centenary and not a patch on the conductor’s Munich studio recording. In the course of a revealing booklet essay, Peter Hagemann ties himself in knots by making a claim for Kempe’s fidelity to the metronome markings that is barely more accurate in the case of a beautifully sprung First with Frans Brüggen from 30 years on.

Hagemann unsparingly charts the doldrums into which the Tonhalle drifted after Kempe’s departure. Christoph Eschenbach’s tenure didn’t end well but space has valuably been found for the Busoni Piano Concerto which he conducted in 1985, originally issued on LP by Aperto. Boris Bloch’s firm handling of the solo part holds its own against more storied interpreters, especially in the imperious rhetoric of the central Pezzo serioso; it’s a shame that both remastering and presentation conflate the succeeding tarantella and choral finale into a single track.

Hagemann is still rather harsh on a Symphonia domestica (‘it lacked any clear outlines’) taped before David Zinman became Chief Conductor in 1995 (also carelessly presented with the Scherzo and ‘Wiegenlied’ as a single movement), but there is an almost brutal honesty about its inclusion alongside the Resurrection Symphony from his farewell to them 19 years later. The transformation wrought by Zinman was more far-reaching yet more subtle than Norrington’s contemporary makeover of the SWR orchestra in Stuttgart. There’s no lack of impact to the finale’s opening cataclysm, yet it ebbs away without portentous emphasis into an exquisitely achieved vision of the hereafter. Both in solo and tutti, the Tonhalle players match Alice Coote and Juliane Banse for dynamic sensitivity and eloquence. Fleet and airy it may be but it isn’t Mahler, concluded Edward Seckerson of their RCA studio account (9/07). This assuredly is.

The orchestra’s Zinman reboot made possible a shapely Haydn Symphony No 44, driven smoothly by Jonathan Nott in 2009 with some unusual, Second Viennese-style wind detailing. The neat if mischievous pairing is another E minor symphony, Dvořák’s New World, from 2002: in the hands of Lorin Maazel, stripped of Bohemian idiom, purring with chrome-plated assurance and capitalising on the weight of the Tonhalle strings to deliver a Scherzo of unapologetically Brucknerian momentum.

On another disc of recent and contrasting guest conductors (from 2014 15), Charles Dutoit in the Organ Symphony faces off against Esa-Pekka Salonen in Sibelius’s Fifth. Dutoit takes a sinuously Wagnerian approach to Saint-Saëns, not altogether tidy (the finale gets off to a shocker) but charged with atmosphere, on and off stage, pulling unusual counterpoint from the texture and making a case for the work, not unlike Barenboim’s, as a symphonic precursor of Magnard and Roussel. The Sibelius is dynamically less refined than other accounts by Salonen, whether live or on record, and the swan theme is capped with an unlikely but wholly satisfying apotheosis in the Austro-German mould.

At the age of 28, perhaps Lionel Bringuier was faced with an impossible challenge as Zinman’s successor, though he was the orchestra’s own choice. A skittish and ill-balanced Symphonie fantastique serves to confirm why his tenure lasted only four years; local critics complained of, as one put it, ‘a loss of interpretative depth, precision in orchestral work and not least creative charisma’, all borne out here. The baton has passed to Paavo Järvi, whose experience surely equips him to build on the legacy of Kempe and Zinman.