Tennstedt

This is a taut, dense Mahler 6, missing all the angst that one finds in the recordings of Bernstein or Tennstedt. But this "tragic" symphony is much less frantic than his others, and Dohnanyi's interpretation, so similar to Szell's with the Cleveland Orchestra, is the way I feel the symphony ought to be played. This ranks in my top three or four Mahler 6, along with Abbado Berlin, Karajan, and Szell.

It's a tall order to compile the best classical music of the twentieth century, but EMI has selected its top 100 classics for this six-disc set, and it's difficult to argue with most of the choices. Without taking sides in the great ideological debates of the modern era – traditionalist vs. avant-garde, tonal vs. atonal, styles vs. schools, and so on – the label has picked the composers whose reputations seem most secure at the turn of the twenty-first century and has chosen representative excerpts of their music. Certainly, the titans of modernism are here, such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name just a few masters, but they don't cast such a large shadow that they eclipse either their more backward-looking predecessors or their more experimental successors.

You will probably be as incredulous as I was to learn that the greatest cycle of Mahler symphonies comes not from any of the usual suspects - Abbado, Bernstein, Chially, Haitink, Kubelik, Rattle, Sinopoli, Solti, Tennstedt - but from the unsung Gary Bertini, who spent the better part of his career as music director of the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra. Unlike any of those more publicized sets, each of which includes a misfire or two, Bertini is consistently successful from first to last; his performance of each of these works can stand comparison with the very best available.

The Radio Legacy is a compilation of the seven part Anthology of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the four box sets devoted to the orchestra s chief conductors Willem Mengelberg, Eduard van Beinum, Bernard Haitink and Riccardo Chailly, and also featuring more recent recordings with Mariss Jansons.

The Anthology of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra is a recorded history of six decades of performances by the Concertgebouw Orchestra, taken from broadcasts contained in the archives of Dutch Radio and Radio Netherlands World Service. RCO Live has chosen not only legendary performances under chief conductors of the RCO but also concerts led by countless guest conductors of both greater and lesser renown. The sixth volume of the anthology features broadcasts from the 1990s, and presents a fascinating and colorful portrait of the orchestra s artistic development under various conductors during that period.