Do you remember your first impression of the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra? If it was anything like mine, it will have been a cover photo: youthful-looking musicians, dressed in white and smiling up at the camera from a verdant backdrop. At a time (the mid‑’80s) when Deutsche Grammophon’s public image was still, more often than not, the scowling face of an elderly Herbert von Karajan, it seemed like a minor revolution: a vote of confidence in freshness, youth and a lighter, brighter, more democratic kind of music-making. Imagine it – they made artistic decisions collectively, and played without a conductor! Their recording of string music by Elgar and Vaughan Williams was the first that I ever bought with my own pocket money, and I played it until the tape wore out (12-year-olds didn’t own turntables or CD players in 1986).

And I remember being most put out when I read a contemporary reviewer who felt that this repertoire demanded a weightier string tone. I suppose they must have been thinking of Barbirolli or Boult. Now here we are, four decades on, and the Orpheus/DG discography is making what we must assume will be its last appearance in physical form. Revisiting these 55 discs is like surveying (slightly ruefully) the history of the CD boom: a surge of recordings between 1982 and the early 1990s, slowing to a trickle and then ceasing altogether in 2001 with a slightly dispiriting crossover project with the young Andreas Scholl. (Jan Lisiecki’s glorious, airborne 2018 Orpheus recording of Mendelssohn piano concertos – 4/19 – is very much an outlier.)

Never such innocence again – and especially not once you’ve read Mozart in the Jungle, oboist Blair Tindall’s sex’n’drugs exposé of life in Orpheus in its 1980s glory days. If you want to take the Lebrecht perspective, this box isn’t so much a coffret as a coffin for a whole era of classical recording. But it’s still a wonderfully bright and cheerful thing to have on your shelf. The first impression, once more, is just how much imagination and enthusiasm went into the artwork alone: those playful group photos, the carefully chosen paintings (Hopper for Ives, Hockney for Stravinsky), and the lovely original illustrations that DG commissioned for the Mozart series that formed the heart of its early commitment to Orpheus. At a point when listeners were ready for a leaner, more energised orchestral sound – but not, perhaps, as accepting of Historically Informed sonorities as they are today – it’s easy to see why DG saw Orpheus as a winner, and invested accordingly.

Anyway, time to listen: and for an instant overview of the orchestra’s strengths (and weaknesses), try Mozart’s Second and Third Horn Concertos. DG’s faith in the group was such that it recorded all of Mozart’s wind concertos with Orpheus players as soloists, and you’ll have to decide for yourself if you enjoy William Purvis’s distinctly transatlantic horn tone. (Frank Morelli’s Bassoon Concerto is probably the pick of this series, though Randall Wolfgang’s cheesewire oboe sound in K314 is the only one that I found actively objectionable.) The orchestra flies at the tuttis con brio, with generous vibrato and big, romantic swells to the string phrasing. But listen, also, to the rhythmic verve of those galloping finales. They almost swing – and that headlong, life-affirming rhythmic flair is a constant throughout the Orpheus discography.

So if these Mozart recordings represent the last hurrah of the post-war modern-instrument chamber orchestra revolution (soon to be submerged by the rising tide of HIP), I hope it’s clear, too, that the criticism often levelled at the Orpheus in the 1980s – that performances without a conductor lacked ‘personality’ – is nonsense. Their Mozart serenades and divertimentos have a terrific buoyancy, and you won’t find a more romantic account of the string Sinfonia concertante or a performance of its woodwind counterpart that sounds more truly like a concertante symphony, with the four soloists absolutely part of the ensemble. The wind serenades have a chamber-like intimacy, too.

And if the group’s sometimes aggressive (and not always refined) tutti attack isn’t to your taste in Mozart, it’s a positive strength in the seven albums of Haydn symphonies that the orchestra recorded between 1982 and 1992. They’re an intriguing selection, weighted towards Haydn’s middle period, and the players’ natural ebullience is an excellent fit – reminiscent in spirit (though not much else) of recent period-instrument recordings by Il Giardino Armonico. The final envoi of the Farewell Symphony is gracefully handled, and the whole violin section gets in on the joke in the finale of Il Distratto. ‘Boisterous’ and ‘big-hearted’ appear frequently in my notes, and any of the Orpheus Haydn recordings, chosen at random, would make a delightful introduction for a Haydn novice taking their first steps beyond the ‘London’ and ‘Paris’ Symphonies. These are performances that deserve to last.

The Orpheus’s Baroque recordings are a trickier matter. Our ears have changed: what sounded lithe and fresh in the 1980s sounds positively supersized in 2021. None of which is to deny the vigour of the Orpheus’s Handel or the sweet-toned, bright-eyed playing of Patrick Gallois on a 1992 disc of Vivaldi flute concertos. And the young Gil Shaham’s interpretation of The Four Seasons is exactly as lustrous as you’d hope, with Fritz Kreisler’s gloriously inauthentic Concerto ‘in the Style of Vivaldi’ as a delicious encore. Lollipops aside, DG never let Orpheus loose on Bach, just as (with one late exception) they never let them record any Mozart symphonies (as opposed to serenades and concertos). Were these lofty pinnacles reserved for the Mitteleuropean big beasts on the DG roster? It would explain the absence of Beethoven here, with the exception of a volatile, bristling 1986 Prometheus that makes you wonder what might have been.

Still, in a fascinating booklet note, Jed Distler explains that the orchestra was anxious to be recognised for how, rather than what, it played. With its New York base, it was a natural partner for US-based soloists such as Mischa Maisky, whose sonorous, richly expressive Schumann and Saint-Saëns concertos, as well as Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, place the orchestra in a slightly recessed sonic perspective. (Elsewhere, though, they benefit from some first-rate engineering.) Apparently they had to lean quite hard on DG to record Verklärte Nacht, coupled with Schoenberg’s two Chamber Symphonies; the resulting performances are ardent, eloquent and admirably lucid. Three CDs of neoclassical Stravinsky spring off the page in crisp primary colours. Playing music of such rhythmic and timbral complexity without a conductor is still an astonishing feat, and Distler singles out a performance of Copland’s Short Symphony for its effortless precision.

Indeed, wherever the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra engage intellect as well as enthusiasm, they deliver something special. Back in 1993 I remember finding their Ives slightly spartan after Leonard Bernstein’s full-orchestral opulence. Listening today, though, their Three Places in New England and The Unanswered Question project a captivating sense of atmosphere and concentration, with some exquisite woodwind-playing: performances to treasure. Likewise – at the other end of the stylistic spectrum – a lush pair of Richard Strauss wind sonatinas, a joyous Le bourgeois gentilhomme, a bright, dancing Respighi Trittico botticelliano and an entertainingly operatic disc of Weber clarinet concertos (with the orchestra’s own Charles Neidich as soloist). The Orpheus energy is particularly infectious in Mendelssohn – a trio of string symphonies and a sparkling pair of early concertos, with Gil Shaham and Martha Argerich sounding as if they’re having the time of their lives.

And the misfires? That’s putting it a bit strongly. I’m not convinced that these players are wholly inside the Eastern European sound world: their Dvo∑ák, Kodály, Bartók and Suk all tend to the bland, though it’s never less than polished. A chrome-plated, streamlined venture into Ravel and Fauré wasn’t to my taste, and a soporific programme of guitar concertos, with Göran Söllscher as soloist, has the orchestra walking on eggshells. As for their 1989 disc of Baroque lollipops – well, if you like your Pachelbel Canon and your Albinoni Adagio with oodles of double cream, this is the sort of thing you’ll like. It’s of its time. But it’s frustrating that the Yellow Label never let Orpheus loose on anything much more contemporary than Stravinsky. A solitary CD of Orpheus co-commissions from 1990 is (with the exception of William Bolcom’s anarchic Orphée-Sérénade) tepid, sub-minimalist stuff, though it’s brilliantly played.

Oh well: perhaps there’s an opening there for an enterprising major label. If this set proves anything, it’s that we shouldn’t be too hasty to dismiss recordings from the chronological middle-distance – that critical no man’s land between New Release and Classic Recording. Tastes change, fashions move on; industries rise and fall. But there’s a huge amount of energy, insight and (yes) musical personality inside this colourful box, and a bonus track – a hitherto unreleased Mendelssohn Italian Symphony from 2018 – shows that the orchestra’s 21st-century incarnation has lost none of its old panache. The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra created a legacy worth revisiting; let’s hope that these 55 discs are merely a first chapter.