I am aware that many listeners sense an indefinable humanity in the great conducting of the past that simply isn’t available to us in the modern age and I responded more warmly than did Robert Cowan to Bernard Haitink’s patient traversal of Bruckner’s Romantic. I suspect that RC might have preferred the more propulsive approach of another octogenarian who carries the flag for the Austro-German tradition in the latest instalment of what should be the first complete Bruckner cycle in surround sound. That said, the auditory advantages of being immersed in a warm bath of Brucknerian sonority are offset somewhat by the dryness of Leipzig’s modern hall and the relatively lean profile of its orchestra’s strings (with first and second violins antiphonally placed).

As a child in Stockholm, Herbert Blomstedt was introduced to Bruckner when Wilhelm Furtwängler, no less, directed a performance of the Seventh to general bewilderment. The ghost of that maestro’s flexibility survives in his own readings, albeit with a steadier controlling hand, much less in the way of expressive intensity and, of course, cleaner texts.

Like Haitink, Blomstedt has been a serial returnee to the Fourth, speeding up rather than slowing down with the passage of the years. A Dresden account, originally issued on the Denon label and now available from Dal Segno, is the most mellow and least polished. The San Francisco version (Decca, 7/95) would seem to have vanished from the lists.

Blomstedt is now using the Nowak edition and recording live with the ensemble of which he was music director between 1998 and 2005. The biggest contrast with Haitink comes in his pacing of the opening movement, which is fleeter and relatively unsettled. The winds sound a little vexed at the start, as if taken aback by the tempo, although the horn quickly settles down to produce the expected liquid tones. The orchestral playing is mostly very fine. With its generally airy textures, Blomstedt’s Bruckner is neither religiose nor merely technocratic and will not spoil you for grander, more subjective interpretations. It is, however, a little plainer than some will like. The concluding applause is retained and not separately tracked, the packaging elegant.