DAVID MELLOR

Summer Night Concert 2022 Sony (2CDs), out now

★★★★★

The New Year’s Day Concert from Vienna is shown all over the world and is a huge artistic and commercial success for the

Vienna Philharmonic. No surprise, then, that they keep plugging away with the Summer Night Concert (right) from outside the Schönbrunn Palace, in an attempt to replicate their New Year success at midsummer. But it hasn’t happened.

This 2022 one, however, recorded on June 16 and rush-released, is far and away the best yet. Andris Nelsons does well in a varied programme, showing real authority in the opener, Beethoven’s Leonore Overture No3, and doing the same later on with Rossini’s The Thieving Magpie Overture. He keeps the level of musicmaking really high right through to a compelling encore, Johann Strauss II’s waltz, Vienna Blood.

It’s good that this is a two-CD set, rather than the usual single one. Room can therefore be found for the whole of Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No1, with Gautier Capuçon the first-class soloist, and also colourful novelties such as

George Enescu’s First Romanian Rhapsody and music by Smetana and Dvorak.

The programming continues to be a bit wayward, as it usually is. But it is redeemed here, to some extent, by a trio of almost unknown pieces from Latvia (from where

Nelsons hails), Ukraine, because Ukraine is in all our thoughts right now, and a short Melody by the, to me, totally unknown Myroslav Skoryk.

Nelsons, now in his mid-40s, holds two major appointments: music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

He was first talentspotted by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, and was its music director from 2008 to 2015. Sadly, it couldn’t hold on to him, and we don’t hear anything like as much of him in the UK these days as I would wish.

A number of these pieces you will not readily hear bettered. Which is why I so strongly recommend this well-played and recorded double album – also available in formats that allow this first-class concert to be seen as well as heard.