Hard on the heels of Mariss Jansons and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra giving us fine and powerfully articulated accounts of Bruckner’s Third and Fourth Symphonies (RCO Live, A/09), we have Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony from Jansons and the Bavarian RSO on Bavarian Radio’s in-house label. The performance was recorded live in November 2007 in the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein. As always with Jansons’s Bruckner, the performance is broadly based yet purposeful. As to the Bavarian playing, it is admirably resolute, albeit a touch tired-sounding in the symphony’s peroration.

It is a concert one would certainly have been pleased to hear. Where, however, the recording stands in the larger scheme of things is another matter. Once in a generation a live performance of the Seventh might come along that demands to be preserved, if only as an egregious act of musical daring – I think of Knappertsbusch’s astonishing 1949 Salzburg Festival performance – but this Bavarian Seventh is not that. Nor could it be said to be competitive with several great studio recordings of the Seventh made in the Musikverein with the Vienna Philharmonic itself. One thinks of the 1986 Giulini (8/87 – nla) or Karajan’s astonishing last recording, made in April 1989, both of which are in a different league.