Bruckner: Symphony No 4. RSNO/Georg Tintner (Naxos). Bruckner: Symphony No 1. Saarbrucken RSO/Stanislaw Skrowaczewski (Arte Nova)

Veteran Austrian conductor Georg Tintner leaves no doubt about his stance on Bruckner: "One who deals with eternal things is in no hurry . . . performers and listeners must also allow plenty of time." True to form, his is an easeful Fourth, more splendid in conception than the detail of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra's playing can always yield, but always sure in pacing and rewarding in its spiritual probing. Skrowaczewski, giving the early (and more highly-regarded) Linz version of the First, moves with rougher and more urgent tread in this jauntier (indeed, in Bruckner's terms, jauntiest) world. Remarkably, each disc costs under a fiver. By Michael Dervan

Bach: Goldberg Variations. Rosalyn Tureck (DG, 2 CDs). Bach: Partitas 2, 4 & 5. Richard Goode (Nonesuch)

Rosalyn Tureck, one-time child prodigy, long-time high priestess of Bach on the piano, revisits Bach's Goldberg Variations. She wants her listeners to hear the music as from the inside.

Minutely-detailed nuancing, clearly the result of painstaking, microscopic examination, aims to allow her every observation to register, and stretches the playing time to over 90 minutes. Forget the fact that she'll be 85 next December, hers is an awesome achievement - at times more like a dissection of the piece than a performance - yet as an experience, both demanding and rewarding. Goode approaches three of the Partitas in a more conventional manner. His fluidity of pace is greater, his range of articulation altogether less varied, his part-playing not so obsessively stratified. A simpler pleasure, but it's Tureck who leaves one feeling closer to Bach. By Michael Dervan

Andreas Scholl: Ombra mai fu (Harmonia Mundi)

He may sing Bach like an angel, but is he able for the earthier emotions of Handel opera? The German countertenor Andreas Scholl must have been anticipating such crassly simplistic questions of his new CD, for he has cleverly muddied the waters by choosing a programme of Handel at his most meditative, interwoven with over half an hour's worth of instrumental pieces. The latter - played with superb, clean strokes by the Akademie fur Alte Musik, Berlin - provide the context out of which Scholl's impossibly perfect voice soars and swoops gorgeously into those to-die-for melodies: this is not the Handel of cataclysmic coloratura, but it's an indescribably beautiful reading of Handel nonetheless, and includes such rarities as Rodelinda - due here next month in an Opera Theatre Company production - alongside the eponymous Largo. By Arminta Wallace