The Compact Collection

Rob Cowan on the best Christmas CDs

Maestro myths aside, has there ever been a time when we've enjoyed such a wealth of reisssues and "first-ever" releases featuring great conductors of the past? Collectors with an ear for comparative interpretation are having a ball, but before mentioning the best of the oldest, first a modern maestro who shares with his finest predecessors an ability to plumb musical depths while keeping a keen eye on musical line. Toscanini managed it, so did the legendary Hans Rosbaud, and so does Rosbaud's most gifted successor as head of the South West German Radio Symphony Orchestra, Michael Gielen. Hänssler's five-disc "Gielen Edition" (93.080) gathers together a number of distinguished recordings, not least a bracing and intelligent Schubert Ninth that Gielen and his orchestra gave at the Royal Festival Hall in the spring of 1996. Beethoven is represented by a powerful Eighth Symphony, a pristine Third Piano Concerto (with Stefan Litwin) and a version of the Grosse Fuge showered with different varieties of attack and articulation, as novel as it's fascinating. There's clear-sighted reportage of Scriabin's Third and Bruckner's Sixth, as well as works by Johann Strauss, Ravel, Busoni, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Weber, Steuermann – and Gielen himself. Just the ticket for those who hunger for the new but who also have a taste for the old when it's made to sound new.

Gielen has at least two virtues in common with the great Erich Kleiber: clarity of vision and a resistance to the fads of the day. If the music was good, Kleiber would tackle it, easy or difficult, "standard rep" or avant-garde. A new four-disc set from Music & Arts (available from Harmonia Mundi, "four for the price of three", on CD-1112) finds the consistently energetic Kleiber leading the NBC Symphony in varied repertoire, some of it passed over by the orchestra's regular conductor, Toscanini. Tchaikovsky's Fourth, for example, shaped and dramatised with a strikingly individual baton. There's an urgent Eroica (very unlike Toscanini's), a wistful Schubert Fifth (sample the slow movement), and a lean but stirring rendition of Borodin's tub-thumping Second. Add more modest fare by Weber, De Falla, Corelli, and Dvorak, and you have a fine if sonically compromised sampling of Kleiber's dynamic style.

By contrast, Otto Klemperer and EMI offer a sonic leap for their classic two-disc collection of Wagner "bleeding chunks" (CMS5 67893 2), with a supremely sensitive Siegfried Idyll as a bonus. The rest – purely orchestral music from Rienzi, Tannhäuser, Lohengrin, Parsifal, Die Meistersinger and Der Ring – attests to a noble, patient and structure-conscious view of Wagner that provides a refreshing alternative to various excitable rivals. But, if I were asked to choose a gift that offers the highest yield of musical warmth – not an unreasonable request at Christmas – then it would have to be a super-budget 13-disc collection of Sir John Barbirolli recordings taken from EMI's "British Composers" series (7243 5 75790 2 5). The real gems are lavish and loving statements of Elgar's and Vaughan Williams's Second Symphonies, Elgar's Gerontius with Dame Janet Baker, and a two-disc Delius collection, affectionate in every semiquaver and a credible match even for Sir Thomas Beecham (also on EMI). "Glorious John" (as Vaughan Williams famously called him) can rarely have been more generously commemorated, and as generosity was central to his character, the gesture is particularly appropriate. And for those who fancy venturing among lesser-known British musical byways, the same collection also includes music by Rubbra, Britten (the original version of the Violin Concerto) and Michael Heming.