Listening to Bruckner in the privacy of one’s own room has always required a certain staying-power, even for those of us brought up in an age when radio listening was a naturally acquired skill which fed the gramophone habit. What the Bruckner experience must be like for the YouTube generation doesn’t bear thinking about. Seeing helps, more particularly when, as here, an outstanding performance has been so intelligently filmed.

One of the world’s finest Bruckner ensembles, the Munich Philharmonic has already recorded classic accounts of the Fourth Symphony under Kempe (Scribendum, 3/80^R) and Celibidache (EMI, 1/99). Christian Thielemann’s performance is comparably fine, not least for the orchestral playing which has the kind of concentration of tone and attack one used to associate with the Berlin Philharmonic in this repertory. Thielemann’s podium manner is that of a general calmly surveying the landscape spread out before him. Like Fritz Reiner, he tends to keep baton and body movements to a minimum with an unblinking gaze controlling proceedings in a 180° field of vision.

Harald Reiter’s booklet essay speaks of “the apparent paradox between total commitment to the task in hand and at the same time a highly effective, conscious and intellectual organizational power”. Dynamic control is masterly, paragraphs are clearly marked, silences fully exploited, climaxes expertly tiered. The slow movement is taken at a slower tempo than Bruckner requests. On CD it might hang fire; seen as well as heard, it works perfectly well. There is a thrilling account of the Scherzo and a properly broad-based approach to the finale. Agnes Méth’s video direction is excellent. As reportage it is superb, as a piece of visually conceived musical analysis the camerawork outscores even the finest programme essay.The performance of the Seventh Symphony, also filmed in the Festspielhaus Baden-Baden, begins with what are in effect two slow movements, culminating in the sombre funeral rites, memorably realised, of the second movement coda. Though the lights go up in the last movements this is not quite as easy a recommendation as that of the Fourth which is set to be a DVD Bruckner classic.