In June this year, Riccardo Chailly stepped down as music director of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, to be succeeded by Mariss Jansons. Chailly's last appearances in Amsterdam exemplified his range as a conductor - there was a new production of Verdi's Don Carlo for Netherlands Opera, running in parallel with performances of Mahler's Ninth Symphony in the orchestra's home at the Concertgebouw itself.
He had been in charge there for 15 years; it was a hugely successful regime that not only confirmed the orchestra as arguably Europe's finest, but also cemented Chailly's ranking among the aristocracy of present-day conductors. It is hard to remember now that his initial appointment in 1988 was greeted with some surprise and scepticism. Not only was he just 35 when he took over, but he was also the first non-Dutch conductor to be appointed, following in the footsteps of Willem Mengelberg, Eduard Van Beinum and Bernard Haitink.
Yet Chailly has shown consistently that he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as any of his predecessors. A flavour of what he achieved in that decade and a half is provided by this magnificent set of recordings, all taken from Dutch radio broadcasts of his Amsterdam concerts; Netherlands Radio has already released similarly comprehensive sets devoted to Van Beinum and to Haitink. This set begins with performances taken from the first concerts Chailly conducted with the orchestra in 1985 and continues right up to last year. Some 40 works are packed on to the 14 discs, one of which is a DVD of Chailly conducting Stravinsky (Firebird, Pulcinella and The Rite of Spring), filmed at the orchestra's Christmas Day concerts in 2002 and 2003.
Though there are Beethoven and Tchaikovsky symphonies here (the Second and the First respectively), as well as a Verdi overture (La Forza del Destino), Mussorgsky's Songs and Dances of Death and chunks of orchestral Wagner (Siegfried's Rhine Journey) and choral Bruckner (the F minor Mass), the centre of gravity of this collection is much closer to our own time, and the vast majority of the scores were composed in the 20th century. Chailly's father Luciano was a composer, and Riccardo has always been a vigorous champion of contemporary music, as well as a commanding interpreter of the early 20th-century modernist repertoire, which he conducts as well as anybody alive today.
If Stravinsky is one focus of this set (there's a Petrushka and a fabulously incisive performance of Agon, as well as the three ballet scores on the DVD) then Berio is the other. The Concerto for Two Pianos, the solo-piano concerto Echoing Curves, and the Folk Songs (with the Dutch mezzo Jard van Nes as the soloist) are all here, as well as the orchestral memorial Requies, and the iridescent large-scale Formazioni, one of Berio's greatest achievements. In each, Chailly shows his instinctive understanding of the music's lyricism, play of instrumental colours and sinewy rigour. But he is just as convincing in Wolfgang Rihm's elemental Schwarzer und Roter Tanz, an extract from the full-length ballet Tutuguri, and the works by Dutch composers - Tristan Keuris, Peter Schat, Theo Verbey and Geert van Keulen - that are included.
It remains to be seen whether Jansons will show anything like the same commitment to local composers or to contemporary music in general. Nevertheless, it is wonderful to hear the Concertgebouw play such repertoire - just as, in the overwhelming performance of Varèse's Amériques, the anguished account of Webern's Op 1 Passacaglia and the vivid presentation of Zemlinsky's fantasy after Hans Christian Andersen's Die Seejungfrau (even better than their Decca recording), one can wallow in the sound of a great orchestra playing at the height of its powers.
Inevitably, there is some Mahler too, though it is a marginal disappointment that the symphony included is the Eighth (a performance from the 1995 Mahler festival, which was one of the real highlights of these years in Amsterdam), though the performance is even more involving and imposing than the recording he made as part of his Mahler cycle. There's nothing either (for contractual reasons I assume) from the opera productions that Chailly conducted at the Amsterdam Muziektheater each summer with the Concertgebouw in the pit, just a flavour of the elemental drama he brings to that repertory in the pieces of Verdi and Wagner that are included. That's not a big disappointment, though - every disc in this set is glorious, and anyone at all interested in 20th-century orchestral music will find it endlessly fascinating.
