When Günter Wand died last year at the age of 90, after little more than a decade in the musical limelight, the question was still being asked, ‘Where had he been all his life?’. These Testament issues help provide part of the answer.

First Kapellmeister in Cologne from 1938 to 1974, Wand was nearing his 40th birthday when long-playing records first appeared in 1950. With a score of grandees from the pre-war era commanding the attention of the principal record companies, there were limited pickings for the generation of conductors born c1912. Karajan, the oldest of the group, was already way ahead of the game; Celibidache, snootily disdainful of recording, claimed not to be interested. Kubelík, Kempe and Giulini had all been marked down as princes-in-waiting by EMI’s Walter Legge, who knew of Wand but who, in May 1954, elected to make a long-term deal with one of Wand’s own musical gods, the 69-year-old Otto Klemperer.

Wand’s decision to withdraw from the operatic element in his Cologne position didn’t help his marketability. (Where would his contemporary Georg Solti have been if he had done likewise?) In 1954, frustrated by lack of work, Wand signed up to one of the first of the new record ‘clubs’, Club Français du Disque, for which he would make some 40 recordings. With tie-ups to similar clubs in Europe, sales of up to 20,000 copies could be expected for each release. As a stratagem, it secured Wand an outlet and an income, but it effectively put him off-limits to major record companies for the next 25 years.

The Club Français releases were simply but effectively recorded. Jean-Paul Legrand was Wand’s principal engineer and one can hear why he trusted him. The balances on this 1956 mono recording of the Ninth Symphony are superior, not only to those on the 1955 Legge/Karajan set, but also to those on Wand’s own later stereo version. Legrand’s 1965 recording of the Missa solemnis has a similar intimacy and focus.

The oddest recording here, the only one not by Legrand, is that of the Fifth Symphony recorded in experimental stereo in December 1956. With the lighter-sounding textures on the right and the darker-sounding ones on the left, the work’s dark-versus-light argument is somewhat rudely underlined. That said, the recording has presence and body, and the performance is sturdy and vivid, with some especially fine orchestral playing in the first two movements. The Scherzo is strangely lethargic but the reading takes fire again for a vivid, tub-thumping account of the finale.

In the Fourth Symphony, recorded by Legrand in exemplary mono earlier that year, the somewhat stolid manner of the Cologne Orchestra is offset by well-sculpted phrasing and Wand’s exacting and purposeful way with rhythm. In the long run, though, quality of playing does matter. I compared this to Klemperer’s 1957 Philharmonia account and found the difference lay almost exclusively in the superior fluency and ‘touch’ of the London orchestra.

There is an unwelcome deliberation in Wand’s conducting of the slow movement of the First and the trio of the Seventh; for the rest, the two readings are clean-limbed and light on their feet. I couldn’t make much of this rawly played 1954 account of the Second Symphony but the overtures, recorded some years later, are vastly superior in style and execution. The admirably recorded 1956 Ninth is worthy rather than inspired.

The 1965 Missa solemnis, by contrast, is both worthy and inspired. Alec Robertson once wrote: ‘Beethoven’s Missa solemnis forces one to think anew about the words, to realise what they meant to a man who had not easily accepted them as Haydn and Mozart had so often done.’ For Wand and his amateur Gürzenich Choir words matter, as we can hear most movingly in the ‘Incarnatus’, the ‘Crucifixus’ and the whole of the ‘Benedictus’. The result is a performance, devout yet persuasively driven, which lays claim to the work in a peculiarly personal way. The soloist who immediately impresses is Peter Schreier but it is possible to make friends with the other soloists as the performance unfolds. The solo violin playing in the ‘Benedictus’ is representative of the performance’s ingrained humanity and warmth.

The fill-up, a mono Eroica from 1956, is no great shakes. Michael McManus’s note tells us how Wand worked on the score of the Ninth, eradicating many of the grosser accretions from the Cologne parts. His Eroica, however, is textually corrupt in a way that, for example, the 82-year-old Pierre Monteux’s 1957 VPO recording (RCA, 11/63 – nla) was not.

If you are wondering what happened to Club Français’s recordings of the Sixth and Eighth symphonies, the answer is they had already been made under a different conductor, Fritz Lehmann.