Classical Music: THIS WEEK'S RELEASES

HANDS UP all those who still love a good, old-fashioned sonic blockbuster, immediate and powerful - the sort of "sock-it-to-me" sound you hear in the cinema and that, back in the Fifties and Sixties, American Mercury engineers were famous for. Strange to say, it doesn't date, even with a sheet of tape hiss as proof of vintage.

Years ago, Universal (then Polygram) launched a Mercury CD series, vividly refurbished, and it is now flooding back either as single SACDs or multi- disc boxed sets. The conductor Antal Dorati was always central to the Mercury enterprise. Dorati's Bartok (475 6255, five discs oooo9) is earthy, driven, utterly idiomatic and attentive to detail, his account of the rustic Dance Suite more sexily insinuating than anyone else's before or since. Sessions involve the London Symphony Orchestra (Concerto for Orchestra, Wooden Prince, Bluebeard's Castle, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta), Philharmonia Hungarica (Dance Suite, Two Portraits etc), BBC Symphony (Miraculous Mandarin complete ballet, Divertimento) and Minneapolis Symphony (Second Violin Concerto with Menuhin, Suite No 2). Dorati was strong on pulse, clarity and, in the ballets and the opera Bluebeard's Castle (with Mihaly Szekely and Olga Szonyi), a palpable sense of theatre.

His June 1959 LSO account of Stravinsky's The Firebird ballet (SACD 470 643-2 ooooo) still stands a notch or two above all others, both as interpretation and as sound. Follow from "The Arrival of Kastchei the Immortal" (track 14) through to the end, the precision and dynamism of the playing, the explosive attack of the big drums, Dorati's finely tensed conducting an object lesson for all time.

Dorati's Tchaikovsky Symphonies (Nos 1 to 6, all with the LSO, plus fill- ups - 475 6261, five discs oooo9) place the balletic element well to the fore, the overall approach taut, transparent and dignified. The Fourth and Fifth symphonies cut to the chase with freshness and candour, whereas the First Symphony opens with a fairytale sense of anticipation, the rest of the performance both exhilarating and lyrical.

Mercury also showcased the talents of the Detroit Symphony under its disciplinarian rostrum chief at the time, Paul Paray. This programme of orchestral works by Chabrier (SACD 475 6183 ooooo) combines boldness with elegance, the playing always crisp and light. Try the Suite Pastorale, with its tiptoe "Idylle", or the Bourree fantasque, orchestrated by Felix Mottl, so French in colour and sentiment, busily dancing one moment, lost in reverie the next.

If Paray's Chabrier appeals, you can follow it up with French Orchestral Music (475 6268, five discs ooooo). The programme ranges from Paray's Mass for the 500th Anniversary of the Death of Joan of Arc, to Saint- Saens' Third Symphony, Chausson's Symphony in B Flat, through to music by Ravel and a host of frothy overtures. The performances are clean and energetic, and the recordings vividly fulfill the label's appetising promise of "Living Presence".

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