Orchestral

Abbado's live performance of Mahler 9 is a haunted, desperate thing that, from the first aborted climax to the washed-up final musical lines, reveals him to be someone who excavates further and plumb deeper into the soul of the work than any other conductor.

Reiner's partnership with RCA Victor in the 1950s was one of the greatest in recording history. One of many remarkable fruits from this pairing was this disc, on which you'll find the noblest and fleshiest musical incarnation of Strauss's "Hero" ever recorded.

Nothing less than the heavens above are charted by Bruckner in these nine giant works. The trajectories of intergalactic objects can be heard in the fizz of the strings and roar of the brass lines that rain down on our ears. Wand's cycle is peerless in charting the epic journeys.

These Russian recordings aren't just overpowering, they're terrifying, shifting pace with force and abandon, one moment tossing you out into the waves, the next gently washing you to shore. Hold onto your hats and hearts.

Sanderling's reading of Brahms is an unsentimental one and the symphonies are shot through with passion and pulse. The recording is vivid, the East Germans' playing first-rate and the musical control masterful. Unforgettable stuff.

Symphonie Fantastique, Berlioz's only symphony, is the first of the romantic era, and arguably the most inspired, a love-driven, opiate-ridden flight of the fancy that gusts along with unprecedented brilliance. Indian conductor Zubin Mehta shapes and guides the winds to perfection.

Karl Bohm was a crowing Nazi who once stopped a rehearsal dead in order to watch Hitler's 1923 beer hall putsch. His pioneering Mozart cycle, by contrast, is all self-effacing sophistication: textures are light, movement fast and phrasing chipper.

Two of music's greatest pranksters, Haydn and Beecham, offer up a jolly old jaunt, rollicking through Haydn's toe-tapping London symphonies like in some Ealing Comedy. There's wit and grace here to spare.

Rhythm lies at the heart of these two extraordinary symphonies. While the seventh sees "the apotheosis of the dance", in the words of Wagner; the fifth sees the climax of the rhythmic motif, as the famous knock of fate is passed from one movement to another, the composer turning the idea again and again in his hands, moulding new shapes out of the primal clay. Kleiber's urgent, gritty and confidant interpretations unlock the dynamism in the works like no one else. Not until Stravinsky would classical music again witness such ebullient, rhythm-routed primal screams.