Strauss’s scores are like sweetshops for conductors, full of glistening treats; they just have to decide how greedy they’re feeling. As you’d expect, Günter Wand is disinclined to linger in the Four Last Songs, at least at first. The Cologne orchestra, never the most tonally succulent of bands, may be one reason why, and they succumb to various bouts of poor tuning that will be familiar to anyone following Wand’s radio-recording career through these discs. However, Martina Arroyo’s approach is so open-necked, so confidently sexy, that Wand seems gradually won over, with a lovely pause over the coda of “September” and an impassioned way with the basses surging through the texture of “Beim Schlafengehen”. By the time we get to the big string theme (at 3'36") in “Im Abendrot”, we’re in Straussian heaven, albeit having arrived on a rather zippier stairway than usual.

A tight rein on the youthful First Horn Concerto reaps more expected rewards, with especially close dialogue between soloist Baumann and the orchestral strings in the Andante (which according to the track-listing starts at the beginning of the finale). It’s too bad about the ill-tempered Mozart coupling, which is boomy and flat-footed.

We could also have done without the Brahms on the disc of more recent Munich performances, I think; it adds nothing to Wand’s four previously issued accounts of the work, and in their different ways, the orchestras in Hamburg and Chicago have something less comfortable, more C‑minor‑y to offer, which means their slow introductions are weightier and their fast movements more impulsive even if the clock tells a more consistent story.

The Beethoven is something else: sheer delight, from sonorous trumpets held in check at the end of the opening movement’s introduction, to cheeky flutes at the end of the exposition, to a recapitulation that feels all the more assertive for the unusually dark clouds of the development.

With Celibidache as ringmaster at the time, the members of the Munich Philharmonic are well used to listening to each other, and what a difference that makes in the conversational slow movement, the winds talking of many things while the strings come and go, always observant of just how quietly they should shut the door behind them. You have to go back to Fricsay or Karajan (1974) for a First as alive and personal and tingling with its own potential as this one.