CLASSICAL

Brahms: Symphonies 1-4; Overtures; Hd Variations; Schicksalslied. Westminster Symphonic Choir, NYPO/Kurt Masur Teldec, 4509-90833-2 (58 mins); 903 1- 772912, (49 mins); 0630-3695-2, (57 mins); 4509-90862-2, (54 mins) 1 Dial-a- track code: 1641

The New York Philharmonic's Bruckner at the NCH in August lacked some essential inner pulse. It was as if directness of musical expression had been made subservient to some larger didactic purpose. The orchestra's recordings of the Brahms symphonies, taken from concert performances between 1992 and 1995, however, labour under no such burden. The NYPO's music director Kurt Masur handles Brahms with natural ease and fluidity.

Nothing forced, the music is unfolded with a strongly linear cogency and a firm grasp of overall shape. I particularly liked the way everything in these performances (which have very much the feel of a live concert as opposed to a studio recording) seems to fit and relate without being jostled or pressured. It's a bit ungenerous of Teldec to have spread the cycle over four discs, but the couplings (Tragic Overture with No. 1; Academic Festival Overture with No 2; Haydn Variations with No 3; and Scliicksalslied with No 4) are rewarding, too, and the recordings are well worth investigating.

Bruckner: Symphony No 8; Strauss: Metamorphosen. Staatskapelle Dresden/Giuseppe Sinopoli.

DG, 447 744-2 (2 discs, 114 mins) Dial-a-track code: 1751

With CD capacity limited to 80 minutes, the disc layout of any new recording of Bruckner's Eighth Symphony is a good preliminary indication of interpretative approach. The quickest versions come in at around 70 minutes and fit on a single disc. The more expansive ones breach the 80 minute barrier and have to be spread over two discs. Giuseppe Sinopoli's new recording of the work with the Staatskapelle Dresden (using the 1890 Nowak edition) extends to around 85 minutes. Sinopoli is here an opulent Brucknerian. The Dresden orchestra's string tone is lush, the brass resplendent, and the recording from Dresden's Lukaskirche is commendably spacious. Yet, in spite of the expansiveness, Sinopoli sustains a strong sense of linear direction and happily avoids the sort of navel gazing stasis which undermined the later stages of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's performance of the symphony under Daniel Barenboim at the NCH in September.

Some two disc versions of Bruckner's Eighth have been issued without couplings, but Sinopoli rather more generously adds a finely drawn reading of Richard Strauss's autumnal "study for 23 solo strings", Metamorphosen.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann:

Antiphonen; Omnia tempus habent;

Presence.

Ensemble Modern/Hans Zender.

RCA Victor, 9026-61181-2, (55 mins) Dial-a-track code: 1861

The German composer Bernd Alois Zimmermann, who was born near Cologne in 1918, liked to describe himself as "the eldest of the young generation of composers". He was already an established figure when younger men like Stockhausen began to emerge in the early 1950s, and although he adopted the technique of serial composition, he remained apart from the avant garde of the time. In the years since his suicide in 1970, Zimmermann's reputation has been kept alive by his opera, Die Soldaten (The Soldiers), a complex piece, which will be seen in a new production at English National Opera later this month.

Zimmermann, a man by his own account part Dionysian, part monk, was greatly concerned with techniques of collage and "pluralistic sound composition", concerns which were ultimately wrapped up with his belief in the unity or sphericality of time. Some of his pieces contain printed texts just for the performers eyes, as in one of the pieces recorded here, Presence, a "ballet blanc" for violin, cello and piano, where the composer imagines a bringing together of Cervantes' Don Quixote, Alfred Jarry's Ubu and Joyce's Molly Bloom. Other works, like Antiphonen (for viola and 25 instrumentalists), call upon the players to read the texts printed in their parts. The members of the Frankfurt based Ensemble Modern give trenchant performances of the three difficult and demanding pieces on their new CD.