During his 13 years as principal conductor of the excellent South-West German Radio Symphony Orchestra between 1986 and 1999, Michael Gielen gave some memorable Bruckner performances, lucid and clear-sighted. The pity of it is that they, and SWR’s state-of-the-art recordings, were not released on a mainstream label sooner. It would have been interesting to have this Bruckner Eighth in contention in the early 1990s, in the immediate aftermath of the memorable Vienna Philharmonic sets from Giulini and Karajan and ahead of the Boulez (also with the VPO) and the last of the Wand recordings.

Boulez struck me as being the most likely comparison, and so he is in the finale, of which Gielen gives a rivetingly logical yet at the same time powerful and well-proportioned reading. In the earlier movements, Gielen takes a broader view of the music than might have been expected. This in no way inhibits the sense of forward movement; indeed, in the central climax of the first movement’s development section, where a note of tragedy sounds as the home key proves unattainable, Gielen is actually better placed than Boulez to drive the point home.

That said, Karajan and the VPO, at a comparable tempo to Gielen, are even more remorseless. Similarly, in the opening measures of the slow movement, Furtwängler and Barbirolli, and to a lesser extent Giulini and Karajan, convey more intensely the mood of ‘Come unto to me all that travail and are heavy laden’. Still, Gielen knows how the movement ‘goes’. His tempo is not too slow and the great harmonic staging-posts are laid out clearly before us.

The recording, as I say, is superb. This is partly due to fine engineering, partly to the sense you have of an orchestra which is well balanced, both spatially and in terms of musical equilibrium; beginning with the violins, which are divided antiphonally, everything is where it should be. Gielen uses the fuller Robert Haas edition which helps push the performance onto a second disc.

This leaves room for Coptic Light, a late work (1986) by Morton Feldman of which three recordings are currently extant, most notably the Tilson Thomas on Argo. The inspiration for this 24-minute orchestral soundscape was an exhibition at the Louvre of medieval textiles woven in Egypt for the Coptic Church. It is a sonically busy but strangely static, not to say intensely repetitive, piece. Without evidence of how the textiles were patterned or what they depicted, it is difficult to imagine what precisely the music is ‘about’. What is certain is that it has no connection whatsoever with Bruckner and should on no account be played immediately after it! That reservation apart, it was these kind of juxtapositions of Romantic and modern and post-modern repertory which helped give Gielen’s stewardship of the SWR SO its interest and its edge.