Perhaps reviewers of absolute music on DVD ought to switch off the visuals. If the soundtrack is palpably inferior to its CD-only rivals one might as well forget the whole thing. But what if the opposite holds true? In Mahler and now Beethoven, Abbado and Bernstein go head to head across the generations in a variety of formats. Previously circulated in a bulky box on the TDK label, Abbado’s audio-visual set confines itself to the symphonies, Nos 1-8 deriving from acclaimed Rome concerts of February 2001. DG’s audio-only equivalent was cloned as recently as 2008, sidelining the yellow label’s previous (ie duller) Abbado intégrales in favour of these same Rome tapes though again retaining the Berlin Ninth from the previous May. With me so far? The good news is that Medici Arts’ rebrand is cannily priced, undercutting all comers. Some of Bernstein’s more venerable and wider ranging filmed Beethoven has already been glimpsed, whether on TV or laser disc, but the audio-only incarnations available from DG since the 1980s have enjoyed far wider dissemination.

The battle lines are drawn much as expected. Former speed merchant Bernstein is, by the late 1970s, more inclined to Furtwänglerise his slow movements. Abbado, a Furtwängler admirer in principle, seems ever more Italian, his tauter lyricism allied to a sense of forward movement influenced, we are told, by period practice. The surprise is not the Mediterranean luminosity and scrupulous attention to instrumental detail – one expects nothing less from this source – but the animating sense of line. The Seventh Symphony, possibly too fast for older listeners in its moments of repose, knows precisely where it’s going and why, avoiding the machine-like inconsequentiality that often passes muster these days. The sense of joy present throughout is overwhelming by the close. Bernstein’s triumph is harder-won in traditional fashion, with chunkier sonorities built from the bottom up.

The Second Symphony points up these differences. Abbado has three double basses and four cellos, a frugality belied by the Berliners’ full tone and the amplitude of the sonics. For Bernstein the piece has bigger bones, an Eroica in the making (qv his brief accompanying talk) and the results may even seem a mite dated. Abbado has the benefit of digital technology and, in some pieces, an additional multi-angle option offering the players’ perspective on the conductor himself. Some will find this disturbing simply because he looks so ill.

Bernstein on form is without peer and, since his component volumes are available separately, you may want to go for the highlights. Two instalments stand out. DG 073 4497GH takes in a fun-packed First Symphony indebted to Haydn and a self-consciously earth-shattering Ninth, quite unlike Abbado’s. DG 073 4502GH contains a controversially fleshed-out Op 131, stunningly dispatched by the strings of the Vienna Philharmonic, plus a smattering of overtures including a Bernstein favourite, König Stephan. If you don’t know it, you should.

Abbado is less likely to spoil you for alternative interpretations. A certain mythology has attached itself to his Indian summer which started here with this return to home soil at the end of his Berlin tenure. To borrow from Richard Osborne in these pages, both men are “zealot(s) in the cause of unfettered joy…pleased to be alive and making music, especially if the music happens to be by Beethoven.”