Hard on the heels of Claus Peter Flor’s exceptional New World with the Malaysian PO (BIS, 2/13) comes this scarcely less invigorating offering from Munich. Captured live over three concerts during December 2010 within the glorious Herkulessaal acoustic, it finds Andris Nelsons drawing the most sumptuously refined, pungently characterful and bracingly alert response from the Bavarian RSO. His is a no-holds-barred conception of powerful expressive scope, intrepid incident and obvious affection. Certainly, he moulds the first movement’s life-enhancing secondary material with the most disarming tenderness; the finale’s big maestoso tuttis, too, fairly blaze with authority. If I’m being totally honest, there are a handful of interpretative decisions I’m still coming to terms with (for instance, at fig 9 or 6'13" in the finale, he makes rather a meal of Dvo∑ák’s Poco meno mosso marking).

In other words, Nelsons’s reading doesn’t (as yet) quite stack up with the sheer emotional clout and breathtaking inevitability of, say, Rafael Kubelík’s miraculously fresh broadcast performance from June 1980 with this same band (Orfeo d’Or). At the same time, it would be mean not to extend an enthusiastic welcome to this excitingly combustible newcomer, which comes harnessed to a fine performance of the little-known 1897 symphonic poem Heroic Song. Indeed, Nelsons’s reading – as thrillingly committed as it is consistently insightful – extracts every ounce of eloquence from what remains at best a fitfully inspired creation. A very strong recommendation.