Few performances thought worthy of being preserved on record are without merit. There are occasions, however, as in this account of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony from Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic, when the stars conjoin in their spheres to give us something entirely special.

A pivotal work in Bruckner’s creative development, the Fourth Symphony achieved its completion after what had been a lengthy and often difficult gestation for its 56-year-old composer. The epic Fifth Symphony had already been written and a sixth was all but finished. But it was the lyric Fourth that would transform Bruckner’s reputation with performers and audiences alike after its premiere in Vienna in 1881.

The very quality of the piece has ensured a small but regular procession of recommendable recordings. Some long-serving Brucknerians – Klemperer, Bruno Walter – achieved this outside Austro-Germany. But provenance matters here. It helps if the orchestra has the music in its DNA. It helps, too, if the conductor is steeped in the symphony’s distinctive organ- and Wagner-derived sound world. Such a combination, strange to relate, is surprisingly rare on record, but it is what we have here with Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic.

Thielemann, who has lived with the music for the best part of 40 years, experienced its pitfalls early: the deployment of unduly broad tempos being one. There is no danger of that here, not because Thielemann’s tempos are notably brisk (for that you must go to Klemperer’s 1963 Philharmonia recording – EMI/Warner, 5/65) but because of what can best be described as a perfectly judged rhythmic flow. Thielemann’s forward-moving pulse gives the spacious opening movement a momentum that is in no way prescriptive; witness how the second subject’s rural pleasantries are phrased and sung with such beguiling grace.

There are times when Thielemann opens up spaces you’d imagine would add minutes to the movement’s duration. Yet the clock says otherwise. Time does, indeed, appear to stand still during the approach to the first-movement recapitulation. But this is not stasis. It is one of those ‘wonder in nature’ moments (‘spots of time’ as the poet Wordsworth called them) in which the score abounds. Such is the wizardry of the master conductor.

Bruckner marks the two outer movements ‘moving, not too fast’. Thielemann gives the finale a marginally more purposeful tread than the first, suggesting a journey that has yet to be completed, with grander vistas beyond. These duly appear, always with a quiet majesty that has no taint of triumphalism about it.

This mood of inner quiet that underpins both the symphony and this remarkable realisation of it is most evident in the slow movement: a pastoral meditation – Bruckner’s own ‘forest murmurs’ you might say – which draws from Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic music-making of the rarest pedigree. And let us not forget here the beautifully contrived soundscapes that are part and parcel of Peter Hecker’s finely crafted Sony recording. If the slow movement and hunting Scherzo offer one set of vividly presented and subtly distanced aural delights, the outer movements, where a triple piano can sit cheek by jowl with a triple forte, give us something other; not least because they are part of an expertly controlled longer-term dynamic, the tuttis articulated with what Thielemann calls ‘roundness without blurriness, clarity with a gentle edge’.

The recording was made in Salzburg in August 2020 in time made available during a festival that, famously and without mishap, managed to stage half its advertised programme for 76,000 ticket-holders. The Vienna Philharmonic was at full strength and seated as usual throughout this time of pandemic, such was the quality of the medical oversight Salzburg provided.

Perhaps it was this oasis of quiet in the midst of so much angst that gave an added dimension to the music-making. (Shades of Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic recording an unforgettable Bruckner Eighth in an empty hall in Vienna in October 1944.) Not that a recording such as this, in which a certain circumambient silence is key, could have been made in anything other than studio conditions.

Here, then, is a performance that is both of a piece with itself and at peace with one of the most glorious of all Bruckner’s musical bequests.