Best mastered recordings

I agree with Kal in that there is no way that you can say that the recordings involved are the same recording, but would like to point out at least one thing in general. Each of the recording companies mentioned has different recording philosophies and uses different techniques to record. Telarc has been more of a minimalist, "audiophile" label; depending on when the Telarc recording was made, they may have used as their principal miking array three spaced omni-directional mikes, which will result in a spacious but diffuse soundstage compared to a multi-miked product, such as EMI and DG use. EMI, while it does multi-mike, generally has in the past had a basic miking array that was the main source of their finished product--the spot mikes were used to fix things that didn't work as well as they had wanted in the limited time they had to make the recording in what may have been a new venue for them (this from a talk I had with one of their former recording engineers). DG's general recording philosophy, from what I have read in the past, has been to multi-mike everything, run it all through a very sophisticated mixer and let the producer (tonmeister), in conjunction with the artists, come up with a finished product. Their recording chain is highly processed, is often recorded using short takes of each part of a work rather than a complete movement, and is the antithesis of the audiophile purist recording philosophy--they will be the first to admit that their recordings are intended to appeal to the music lover rather than the audiophile, and I have found that they often tend to sound better on a mass-market system than they do on some high-quality audiophile systems. That their recordings sound like the real thing you'd hear in a concert hall is coincidental, in my view, but the fact that they sound as good as they do musically is a tribute to their artists and to the musical sensibilities of their "tonmeisters".

There, I got that off my chest. In answer to the question, ignoring the example, yes, different recording companies produce different results in their recordings, and there are some that are better than others, depending on what your priorities are in listening to music on your system. Check the archives, there are a lot of threads on this topic. I personally find that, as a general proposition, classical recordings these days of orchestral works have gotten to the point where most of them sound pretty decent to me, though my favorite labels seem to be Telarc, Reference Recordings, London/Decca, Harmonia Mundi, Bis, Ondine, Delos (now defunct, I fear) and the San Francisco Symphony's house label (and take note, there are a number of different recording philosophies represented in this group). None of these companies can match a live concert performance, but these are the labels that seem to produce a more realistic facsimile of a real performance to me. YMMV.

Craig--what I find interesting, and it shows how different people hear things, is that it seems you preferred the DG recording, where I have rarely liked their recordings. I will admit, though, that they do make musically involving recordings on occasion, as sometimes spotlighting an instrument in the mix might better let the emotion of the music come through. Shadorne and others bring up the good point of the recording engineer (I would add the producer too) being of importance. In the classical field some of the people I look for are Mohr-Layton (the original RCA team from back in the 50s), Wilma Cozart-Bob Fine (from the old Mercuries), Kenneth Wilkinson (London/Decca, some RCAs, from the early days of stereo), John Eargle (Delos), Peter McGrath/Tony Faulkner-Robina Young (Harmonia Mundi; Faulkner has done work for others as well), Woods/Bishop-Renner (Telarc), Keith Johnson (Reference Recordings), Kavi Alexander (Water Lily--he is the most purist of this bunch, and quite frankly there are times where his approach might not appeal to me), Craig Dory (Dorian) and the Nicrenz/Aubort team from Vox. EMI had and has a number of good recording teams as well, I just don't recall their names, the engineer I know from there is Simon Woods, who used to be our New Jersy Symphony's CEO, and his recordings were quite good. All of these teams use different techniques to record an orchestra, both from their basic philosophies but also depending on the piece, the venue, the size of the ensemble, the artists (don't think for a minute that Heifetz or Rubenstein didn't want themselves to be spotlit!), etc., and what they come up with may not necessarily sound like what you'd hear in row K of the concert hall, but I think they all have done a good job of getting the bulk of the event on record for us.