The Compact Collection Â

Rob Cowan on this week's best CD releases

I've often wondered what would happen if the world's major radio stations were unexpectedly to make their entire music archives available for commercial exploitation. Would the demand for studio recordings diminish significantly?

The appeal of hearing music caught on the wing, rather than flattened by dreary session "takes", really is taking root, what with the LSO's live Berlioz series and various rival orchestra-originated CD releases. EMI has been searching out live Martha Argerich material; Hanssler exploits important performances by the South West German Radio Symphony Orchestra; and the Munich-based Orfeo label continues to make good use of Bavarian Radio's sizeable tape library.

The latest to appear on Orfeo are three discs devoted to performances conducted by Rafael Kubelik, centring on either music that he never recorded commercially or works that he did record but not with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, which he led from 1961 to 1979 and guest-conducted countless times thereafter. For example, Kubelik's 1950s Mercury recording of Bartok's Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta with the Chicago Symphony hasn't either the energy or the humanity of his 1981 Munich broadcast, a reading full of character, even though the finale takes a little time to settle. The earthy coupling is a Concerto for Orchestra from 1978, in which the "Elegia" sounds like a shared improvisation, and the finale bounces along with more joy than precision.

Kubelik's knack of homing in on salient strands of texture – woodwinds in the Concerto's finale, for example – makes the process of listening as much an education as it is a pleasure.

In the case of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony, taped in concert in 1985, the scherzo's merciless hammering is offset by an almost Dvorakian reading of the trio, where the winds chirrup around the string lines like newly liberated bird song. As with his recording of Beethoven Nine, Kubelik's Bruckner Nine suggests the shock of the new, especially in the tiered finale which gains in tension as it journeys towards that shattering climactic discord.

No recent performance in my experience has quite that capacity to scare or humble, though, by contrast, the Handel Concerto Grosso that opened the same concert (Op 6 No 10) glances back at the stately Handelian manners of Wilhelm Furtwängler, Fritz Lehmann and Otto Klemperer.

There's nothing wrong with that, at least, not in my view, but there will be those collectors who would rather hear this most widely loved of Czech maestros tackle the Czech repertory. Back in the Seventies, Kubelik taped a thrilling Janacek Sinfonietta for Deutsche Grammophon, again in Munich, and although Orfeo's 1981 broadcast recording is less brazen, the interpretation has gained in perspective, and at times become even more menacing. The finale seems darker than before whereas the companion performance of Dvorak's Sixth Symphony yields so much more poetry and fresh air than Kubelik's beautiful but relatively constrained recording with the Berlin Philharmonic. Again, it's a case of hearing a narrative unfold without interruption, scanning the whole as an entity rather than letting the temperature dip while this or that minor detail is cleaned up for commercial consumption. Even when you don't actually hear the tape joins, you invariably sense there has been a loss in concentration, something that virtually never happens in these remarkable live recordings. All sound more than respectable, with the digital Bruckner/Handel coupling being virtually state of the art.

Bartok: Music for Strings, Percussion & Celestra; Concerto for Orchestra (Orfeo C 551 011 B)

Handel Concerto Grosso Op 6 No 10 / Bruckner Symphony No 9

(Orfeo C 550 011 B)

Janacek: Sinfonietta; Dvorak: Symphony No 6 (Orfeo C 552 011 B)

All with the Bavarian Radio SO/Rafael Kubelik