Studio recordings made in Amsterdam by Columbia (tracks 1-6) and Telefunken (track 7)The conductor Willem Mengelberg was born in 1871 into an old German family from the Rhineland. His first post was at Lucerne, from 1892 to 1895, when he was called to take over the direction of the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Menegelberg steadily built the orchestra into a musical body able to rival other major continental orchestras such as the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras. In 1922 Mengelberg took over the direction of the newly created New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra and created the body that Toscanini was later to lead with great success. Mengelberg continued to conduct the Concertgebouw during the German occupation of Holland, and his final concert as a conductor was given in Paris during June 1944. He died in 1951 at his home in Switzerland.As the first volume in this Naxos Historical series of the Mengelberg conducting the music of Brahms (8.110158) has amply demonstrated, the combination of this conductor and composer produced recordings which possess an emotional power and depth of interpretation rarely, if at all, encountered today, and increasingly uncommon since the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. This second volume now brings to the fore one of Mengelberg’s most famous and outstanding recordings his 1931 recording for the English Columbia company, made shortly before its merger with His Master’s Voice to form EMI, of the Third Symphony of Brahms. In this stupendous performance Mengelberg drives the work forward with extraordinary vigour and energy. The intensive and detailed rehearsal which he insisted upon, and which was to make the Concertgebouw the fine orchestra that it is today, is amply justified in the sense of improvisatory spontaneity and detailed nuance that informs the whole reading. Without question this is one of the great Brahms recordings of the twentieth century. The programme of this magnificent CD is completed with Mengelberg’s famous recordings of Brahms’ two overtures the Academic Festival Overture, recorded in 1930 and full of good-humour and joviality, and the doom-laden Tragic Overture, recorded in 1942 in the midst of the horrors of the Second World War. As a rare and valuable bonus, the disc is completed by Mengelberg’s ‘fill-up’ to the recording of the Academic Festival Overture, the third movement of the First Symphony of Brahms, a work which he never recorded in full in the studio (although broadcast transcriptions do exist of Mengelberg conducting this work).