Joys of N.Y. Philharmonic : A 10-CD boxed set of the orchestra’s work is a historical delight.

“Selecting this CD set’s repertoire,” writes producer Sedgwick Clark in the booklet to this extraordinary 10-disc musical trip down memory lane, “was the biggest sandbox I’ve ever played in.” Like other venerable orchestras of the East, orchestras with pasts more glorious than their present, the New York Philharmonic has found that mining the treasures of its archives is both a way to celebrate its great history and also do a little fund-raising.

Founded 155 years ago, the New York Philharmonic has the most history of all American orchestras. It was also the most exciting American orchestra up until the late 1970s, when it seemed to lose some of its nerve and vitality. It certainly sounds great here, its famous electricity already crackling in the earliest surviving recording of a symphony orchestra broadcast, a fragment of Beethoven’s “Coriolanus” Overture, conducted by Willem van Hoogstraten on Dec. 17, 1923. And it plays with a similar blistering ensemble in the most recent entry, a surprisingly vivid account of Mozart’s Symphony No. 29, led by Erich Leinsdorf, 64 years and one month later.

But what really makes this set such a delight is the “sandbox” factor. It is both a representation of an epoch of music history and a genuine celebration of a visceral performance style perhaps more playful and thrilling and immediate than what is fashionable in our sophisticated times. One senses in these performances that the players were making music that was close to them, culturally and personally, the way it is when Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts Ligeti or Michael Tilson Thomas conducts Bernstein.

Strauss’ “Death and Transfiguration” was, for instance, new music when the great Dutch conductor Willem Mengelberg conducted it in New York in 1924. And listening to the two fragments of that performance (all that survives of the radio broadcast), one is struck by the fact that we can no longer quite replicate that sense of immediacy today. One is equally astounded by the bravery of the philharmonic to include something like this, just fragments and in awfully rough sound. But it makes history palpable.

And it produces goose bumps, as does so much in this set. There is Toscanini conducting Sibelius’ “En Saga” (1936) as if he were a superhero wiping out the encroaching fascism in his homeland. There is Stravinsky conducting Tchaikovsky’s “Little Russian” Symphony and Glinka’s “Ruslan and Ludmilla” Overture with the same abrupt accenting that characterizes his own music. Kirsten Flagstad, with the help of Bruno Walter, soars through the Immolation Scene from Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung” with a triumphant exaltation remarkable even for her.

One of the great lessons from all this, and one that we cannot be reminded of too often, is that recordings are only snapshots of a single point in time. Otto Klemperer is well known for the magisterial, ultra-slow Bruckner recordings he made in the ‘60s, late in his life, and we have been led to believe that he brought enormous authority to those interpretations. After all, he’d had, by then, a long and distinguished career as a conductor; he had worked with Mahler, which meant he knew the Bruckner and Mahler tradition firsthand. Yet a performance of the Ninth Symphony here from 1934 is fast, dramatic and intense.

Other highlights include Walter in 1945, conducting a winningly lush performance of Strauss’ “Symphonia Domestica”, and Toscanini, in 1935, offering a surprisingly steamy account of that composer’s “Dance of the Seven Veils” from “Salome.” The 1944 world premiere of the orchestra version of Schoenberg’s “Ode to Napoleon” is documented, with Artur Rodzinski at the podium and the great baritone Mack Harrell as the wonderfully expressive narrator. Nadia Boulanger leads a beautifully sculpted and restrained account of the Requiem by her teacher, Faure, from 1962. Poulenc is the piano soloist in his Concert Champe^tre, with Dimtri Mitropoulos conducting in 1948.

There are the predictable star soloists. Heifetz plays the Brahms Violin Concerto with Toscanini (1935); Rubinstein, the Chopin First Piano Concerto with Walter (1947); Schnabel, the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto with Szell (1945); Oistrakh, the Shostakovich First Violin Concerto under Mitropoulos (1956). None of these pairings is duplicated on commercial recordings. In all of them, sparks fly in the way that rarely happens when performances are recorded for posterity.

And that is the real value of this set. These concerts were broadcast as live performances. The orchestra did not even think to archive most of them, that only came later, and much of what is here was culled from private collectors. Consequently, there is excessive surface noise on the earlier performances, and even an occasional gap.

But noise and gaps are welcome. As listeners, we are peering into the past, and the greatness of the performances is the fact that the musicians were not playing for us but for their own audiences. This music was made only for the moment, and it lives all the more now because of that.

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* “The Historic Broadcasts” is available directly from the New York Philharmonic, (800) 557-8268, and at selected Tower Records stores. $185.