Ten years on from its making in Vienna in 1984, this performance can confidently be claimed as one of the great Bruckner recordings of the age. It is an immensely long-breathed performance yet it is of a piece with itself and the music it serves. It is a reading that is suffused from start to finish with its own immutable logic, cast and voiced, you might say, like a great tenor bell. The playing of the Vienna Philharmonic is similarly whole: luminous as though lit from within, immensely strong, yet flawless in every aspect of tone and touch.
You might argue that Giulini's case is helped by his use of the tidied Nowak text; that Karajan, in his last and greatest recording, goes one stage further by conjuring from the fuller Haas edition a performance of even greater grandeur and sweep.
But the two are not in contention. Both is a miracle sufficient unto itself, the all-Austrian performance a shade earthier, perhaps, a shade rougher-hewn than the Giulini which glows, in this magnificent new transfer, like Carrara marble lit by the evening sun.'