With the final wisps of tuning up and a glimpse of (for some reason) the score of the second flute part, the scene is set for this magnificent performance of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony. Directed by Brian Large, the video was made in September last year at the St Florian Basilica near Linz, where Bruckner had his early experiences of ecclesiastical music and architecture, and where he is buried in a simple tomb beneath the organ. The pace of the video judiciously follows the measured pace of the music and of the performance, slowly homing in on vibrant frescoes in the apse and on the ceiling or on the stucco decoration in the body of the abbey and, at moments of climax, pulling out to reveal the full splendour of the St Florian interior. From the gilded and polished Baroque adornments down to Franz Welser-Möst’s jet cufflinks and the second flautist’s nose stud, there is always plenty to look at in this DVD: Large knows his score and wisely, though not fussily, focuses on particular instruments when they are prominent in the texture, so that timpani and the cymbal player get a fair look in as well as the individual woodwind and, appropriately in this symphony, the horns. Welser-Möst gives special acknowledgement to the Cleveland Orchestra’s principal horn at the end, when a standing ovation from the audience seems the entirely fitting response to a superbly judged musical and visual venture.

Debate as to the preferred version of Bruckner’s Romantic Symphony has always been rife, given its complicated history of revisions during Bruckner’s lifetime and its post-mortem editing. This performance pins its colours to the mast of the final version, the one in which the symphony first appeared in print in 1889 and which has now received new scholarly treatment from Benjamin Korstvedt. Whatever your views on the relative merits of Haas, Nowak or Korstvedt, the sound of the Cleveland Orchestra is superb, refined in detail and matching the grandeur of surroundings that furnish a glorious acoustical bloom. Welser-Möst, with calm control, is a master of the symphony’s structural and emotional trajectory.