First create your sound palette, then envision the whole. In this new account of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, Andris Nelsons and his Leipzig players provide a masterclass in the creation of a sound world that perfectly serves their larger purpose. It’s a palette, what’s more, that’s been created from within the ensemble, not imposed from without, as appears to be the case with Christian Thielemann’s latest drive-through recording of the symphony, his first with the Vienna Philharmonic (Sony, 1/21).

It’s clear from the opening paragraph, and the note of pathos the Leipzig orchestra’s first oboe so movingly strikes, that this Nelsons performance will be more meditative than dramatic. If this results in a reluctance at times to bring out the heavy guns, even at points where Bruckner asks for them, it should be seen in the context of a reading that shows an unusually keen awareness of the frequency with which words such as ‘intimate’, ‘soft’ and ‘sweet’ appear in Bruckner’s text; and the part they play in the symphony’s larger search for catharsis and spiritual resolution.

That said, it’s odd to find Nelsons launching the great finale with an unduly precipitate assault on its opening paragraph. Bruckner’s marking broadly translates as ‘ceremonious, not fast [my emphasis]’, with a pair of confirmatory metronome marks (rare for him) which indicate the need for an integrated approach – metronome 69 dropping to 60 when the consolatory theme in A flat finally appears – as opposed to something more episodic. It’s a mistake many conductors make and, to be fair to Nelsons, he does eventually successfully draw together the symphony’s many strands. This, then, is a performance whose orchestral playing alone would guarantee it a place in the pantheon, even though it would be idle to claim that its cumulative impact is comparable to that of Karajan in his late Vienna recording or Giulini live in Berlin in 1984.

It’s a pity, therefore, that DG has decided to yoke it to a less sure-footed reading of the Second Symphony – recorded, whatever the cause, in the same hall in drier, less rounded sound – and a pipe-and-slippers account of the Meistersinger Prelude that’s rather lacking in energy until the Apprentices come skipping by.

It was Giulini, of course, who held the Bruckner fraternity spellbound with his revelatory 1975 recording of the Second Symphony. (See Deryck Cooke’s review of the original EMI release, 12/75.) Where the new Leipzig performance seems uncertain of its goals, with a degree of hesitancy the work’s occasionally flawed structure can ill sustain, Giulini instantly identifies the mood of psychic disturbance that pervades the long first movement. It’s a perception that’s then held within a powerfully articulated narrative flow which extends onwards to the sunnier moods of the three later movements. It’s the same with Karajan in a sparer-sounding yet still refulgent 1981 Berlin recording that lays bare a more than passing debt by Bruckner to Schubert at his most angst-ridden.

Riccardo Muti, another Italian-born devotee of the symphony, Giulini and Nelsons all use the short-form final version of 1877. Karajan, by contrast, restores the backward glance to earlier movements that Bruckner originally included in the symphony’s peroration. Not that the ‘editions’ question is of much relevance. A great performance of the Second Symphony will blow your socks off whichever text you use.