It was a Gramophone reader who first alerted me to the fact that the Japanese Denon label had acquired a superb recording of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony by Herbert Blomstedt and the Dresden Staatskapelle which VEB Deutsche Schallplatten had made in Dresden in summer 1980. “A blend of eloquence and electricity, deduced from within rather than applied from without” was how I summed up the performance (8/86). For several years, it was the standard recommendation.

Since the CD has long gone from the catalogues, a new Blomstedt Bruckner Seventh is bound to arouse interest. The orchestra is the Leipzig Gewandhaus of which Blomstedt was chief conductor from 1998 to 2005. (The present performance dates from November 2006.) It was the Gewandhaus who gave the symphony’s first performance under Nikisch in December 1884, a somewhat compromised event. There being no Wagner tubas to be had in Leipzig, not even for ready money, Nikisch had to hire extra horns instead. And the Leipzig Bruckner tradition? Well, at the risk of starting a war on the European Union’s eastern flank, I would suggest that the Dresden performance had rather more character.

The new recording is an edited-down version of a set of live concert performances, rarely a satisfactory procedure in my experience. It is not, by clock time, a slower reading, though it seems so: easy-going, understated, a touch sullen in places. Blomstedt is 80 this year but in terms of pace, presence, and intensity his new version lags some way behind the 81-year-old Karajan’s last recording with the Vienna Philharmonic.