To celebrate what would have been Leonard Bernstein’s 90th birthday, Medici Arts has appended some previously unreleased Franck and Milhaud items to four pre-existing DVDs. Sceptics will always ask what it is we are supposed to want from orchestral music on DVD, noting perhaps that whereas the sound quality here is remarkably good, the images, however well framed, are not of the digitised crispness we expect today. Well, one can always just listen. And the audio-only, hard-copy equivalents of most of these performances, as released by DG or EMI, aren’t always easy to find.

With footage running from 1973 to 1990 it might be assumed that the earlier material would show Bernstein at his most compelling. I’m not so sure. The latest taping is drawn from his final series of concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic and it’s profoundly impressive. Bernstein directed only two Bruckner symphonies in his maturity but, with his own health declining fast, he seems to identify with the unfinished Ninth as never before. His control over the orchestra is not in doubt and the confrontation with mortality is dramatised with flair. Or is it that for Bernstein the search for stable, meaningful tonality was itself a matter of life and death? Whether you find the results uncomfortable or revelatory, the players provide the rich-toned strings and gorgeous brass that define what we think of as idiomatic Bruckner-playing. The usually egocentric maestro is plainly conscious of this in the democratic manner in which he tackles his curtain calls.

The Franck from 1981 is at the opposite pole from the fleet-footed Gallic conception associated with Pierre Monteux. The Paris audience goes mad for the reading, unsurprising given the sheer intensity achieved, even if the work’s structure falls apart. Incidentally, tasked with defending such subjective, Romantic interpretations in a DG booklet-note, musicologist James Hepokoski suggested that they “compel primarily through the magnetic force of the conductor’s virtually sacramental, personal identification with the music”. Bernstein believed in flamboyant revivification rather than a reconstructed stylistic accuracy. You have been warned.

After this the Mozart seems surprisingly mainstream, the one-time virtuoso’s part-time pianism in better shape than was often the case in later years. The Brahms, disadvantaged by more restricted camera movements, attests to Bernstein’s long-standing relationship with the Israel Philharmonic; its musicians play their hearts out for him. The Beethoven attests to his place on the world stage. The Ninth is the piece he conducted to symbolise the reunification of the city of Berlin on Christmas Day 1989. Historians and documentary film-makers will look on this as a totemic event, though DG will shortly be issuing in audio-visual form a tauter alternative, the climax of Bernstein’s Beethoven cycle from Vienna. Admirers will want both.