The Compact Collection: Stokowski and the New York Philharmonic; Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra

The week's best CD releases

People often challenge me on the value of listening to old orchestral recordings. I invariably respond with recorded evidence – and without negative comeback. So, if there are any doubters left, here's a useful prescription: take Cala's new CDs of Leopold Stokowski or Andante's Willem Mengelberg collection, listen at least once every couple of days for a month, and you'll almost certainly be hooked forever. To race alongside the searing edge of Stokowski's Tchaikovsky is to risk being burned. But Francesca da Rimini is about passion thrown among the storms of hell, and to play it urbanely is quite simply to miss the point. For his long-forgotten New York Phil recording, Stokowski made numerous cuts and drove dangerously fast, but however "wrong" his method, the rightness of its effect is beyond doubt. The same applies to Mengelberg's Concertgebouw Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, punch-drunk, wilful and emotionally candid though it is. But the intensity of the playing, the love and craftsmanship behind the phrasing, not to mention the extraordinary range of Mengelberg's imagination – nothing you're likely to hear today is even remotely comparable.

There's an idealistic naivety about both these conductors, less the trappings of period glamour than an honest identification with the music's underlying narrative. When Stokowski conducts Wagner, you're immediately drawn into the drama, not just because of the playing, but through the choice of musical texts. For example, Stokowski performs key Götterdämmerung extracts together with linking passages otherwise heard only in complete performances of the opera. Rienzi's Overture blossoms and blazes, and any newcomer to "Wotan's Farewell" would hardly guess the absence of the singing god.

Andante's sumptuously packaged Mengelberg collection offers lifelike reportage of some surprisingly modern-sounding early-Forties Teldec recordings, including Beethoven's Eroica, Tchaikovsky's 1812 and Wagner's Die Meistersinger overture, all three bursting with character. Tchaikovsky's Fifth and Liszt's Les Préludes are earlier and more distant, though scarcely less vivid. In Tchaikovsky Five, Mengelberg explores vicissitudes in mood and temperament that most modern interpreters would deem embarrassingly OTT. Not me, though, and nor, I suspect, at least 70 per cent of our readers.

Stokowski and the New York Philharmonic, Vol 1 (Cala/DI Music CACD0533) and Vol 2 (Cala CACD0534)

Mengelberg and the Concertgebouw Orchestra (Andante.com/ Independent Distributors 2967-9, three discs)