Nelsons keeps a firm grip on the unfolding of the drama [in the 11th]. And here, as in the Fourth, his Boston Symphony Orchestra responds with supreme virtuosity from every section. Whether or not the excellent recordings were really captured live, as DG claims, you’ll never hear these symphonies better played.

This Nelsons cycle started with a bang – namely the most electrifying recording of the Tenth Symphony we’ve had in almost half a century. The excellence continues...Nelsons rejoices in the skewed logic and dotty tangents but does so with a gripping hold on the symphonic argument – tentative though that sometimes is. The impetus and tautness of his account intensify cohesion.And it is fabulously engineered

The last ounce of acerbic bite that I occasionally felt was missing from previous instalments has clearly been saved for this performance of the Fourth...For me this series just gets better and better, and the execution of this latest pair of symphonies, both in terms of Nelsons’s pacing and shaping of the very long movements and also with regard to the virtuoso playing, is really rather staggering.

Nelsons had me riveted from the get go. The precision of rhythmic control coupled to expressive phrasing that speaks, as well as his grasp of the tectonic structure, made the work seem concise and tightly argued. The Boston Symphony’s extraordinary playing elicits enough incidental pleasure to tickle the ear through passages that can become longueurs.