Măcelaru’s new recording with the WDR Sinfonieorchester, of which he is chief conductor, is vividly appealing and captured in sound of great warmth, even lushness.

[Dance Suite] Less raw than Solti, Măcelaru shows himself a master of the score in a reading that crackles with aliveness and presence. He gets animated playing from the Cologne musicians…the recorded sound is full, vivid, and lifelike.

[Măcelaru] displays real kinship here with the melodic colour and cast of the music – not least Bartók’s curvaceous lyricism – and marries it so compellingly to the textural elements.

It's great to hear Bartók's one-act fairy-tale ballet in its entirety here, especially in a performance as vivid and colourful as this: Măcelaru gets the balance between spikiness and sensuality just right, and every section of the Cologne orchestra is on peak form, with incisive, edgy work from the woodwinds (particularly in the bucolic early stretches of the piece) and understatedly gorgeous solos from the leader towards the end. And the numerous moments of organised chaos come off brilliantly.

The Cologne orchestra and its Romanian principal conductor suffuse Bartok’s 1917 ballet with warmth, wit and pathos, alive to the work’s marriage of the fraught and the skittish, the late Romantic and the bucolic...Theirs is an exceptional account, and they are similarly deft in Dance Suite (1923).