‘My father was practically Czech,’ says Nikolaus Harnoncourt after enquiring whether there are any Czech musicians in the orchestra. There aren’t. ‘Then I must be the only one,’ he says, and thus the agenda for Günter Schilhan’s Making of ‘Má vlast’ – the second DVD in this album – is set. It’s a compelling hour’s worth, and not just because Harnoncourt’s rehearsal techniques are so revealing. He talks in interview about each piece, its narrative, themes and aspects of its orchestration. Other conductors are rarely mentioned, though he has a downer on George Szell, who he often played under when he was an orchestral cellist. Harnoncourt disliked Szell’s insistence on precision above everything else and cites Furtwängler and Klemperer as being fine examples at the other end of the interpretative spectrum, where the most interesting performances often resulted from not playing exactly together. There are a handful of section rehearsals, and Harnoncourt’s ability to conjure relevant images – mostly in English – rivals Carlos Kleiber’s. Moments of humour lighten the mood but the overriding impression on both discs is of Harnoncourt’s obvious love for the score.

Agnes Méth’s video direction of the actual concert (the Helmut-List-Halle, Graz, Austria, in June 2010) is admirably restrained, with cameras homing in on groups of musicians rather than on individual players, which means you’re rarely distracted by a single close-up image. The performance is in some key respects not dissimilar to Harnoncourt’s 2001 Vienna Philharmonic RCA CD, also recorded live. But I found myself far more sympathetically disposed towards this newer version, especially at the end of Šárka, which takes off in a way that the VPO performance doesn’t (it’s also quite a bit faster). It’s as if the earlier Má vlast was a work in progress and, for its COE successor, ideas that were then fermenting finally matured. My only reservation concerns the lengths of some of Harnoncourt’s pauses (I noted this on his Vienna recording too), but that’s his way, a stylistic peculiarity, never without musical logic and by no means limited to the work under review. Like so many great conductors, his cueing gestures are often way ahead of the beat. At the end of the concert, the initial impression (surprisingly) is of tepid audience reaction. But the reality turns out to be quite otherwise. The audience’s appreciative response grows louder by the second, with shouts of approval echoing from throughout the hall. The orchestra remains seated out of respect for the conductor, until Harnoncourt literally drags concertmaster Lorenza Borrani to her feet and the others spontaneously follow suit. All told, this handsome production is an impressive tribute to a musician who, although prone to divide critical opinion, is never less than individual, and certainly never less than interesting.