Previously only available in BR-Klassik’s set of Jansons’s recordings of Symphonies Nos 3, 4 and 6-9, reviewed by Rob Cowan in December, No 6 has now been given an individual release, joining all the recordings bar No 3 in being available separately. Jansons made three commercial recordings of the Sixth Symphony in his final decade, all deriving from live performances and similar in interpretative outline. The earliest, recorded in 2012 with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, is the least involving of the three, the performing lacking a degree of fire and imagination. Jansons’s 2018 account with the Berlin Philharmonic, included in both audio and video format in a box of the nine numbered symphonies on the orchestra’s own label, is considerably more successful, the performance of the symphony’s Adagio being especially eloquent.

However, this 2015 reading with Jansons’s Bavarian players is for me the pick of the three, the performance just as well proportioned and played as it is in Berlin but with an extra degree of grip and dynamism in the finale. The sound quality is also extremely fine, presenting tutti passages with a degree more transparency than in Berlin and sounding more rounded than the recording from Amsterdam. No audience noise is apparent other than the final applause.

Among recent recordings of the Sixth Symphony, Gergiev’s with the Munich Philharmonic was identified by Peter Quantrill as an account to reckon with, an opinion with which I would not demur. However, it’s an older recording from another Munich-based ensemble, the Bavarian State Orchestra under Sawallisch, that offers perhaps the most stirring and insightful performance of all.