This is the real thing! Carlos Kleiber's (1982) live recording of the Seventh, made in Munich with the Bavarian State Orchestra, that is if anything even more elctrifying than his Fifth. The Bavarian orchestra play as if their very lives depended on it: the first movement is riveting enough, with a thrilling coda. But the tension is maintained through the finely graduated and ideally paced Allegretto, with richly expressive string-playing. The Scherzo is dazzling, but the finale, taken Allegro molto (rather than con brio), carries all before it, generating enormous energy and thrust, and the coda is built to a height of tension not even matched by Toscanini. Yet overall this is a performance that, for all its excitement, has an underying depth of feeling.