A film of a symphony in live performance filmed just three years after an audio recording of the same piece in the same place with the same performers: and people wonder what’s wrong with the record industry. So this release would be slightly ridiculous if substantially different, and potentially redundant if not. In the event the timings are so similar – out by half a minute in the Adagio, much less elsewhere – that one is left investigating whether the intervening three years of music-making between the orchestra and its music director brought about greater intimacy and understanding, and here the answer is positive. Paradoxically there are more slips, especially of ensemble, in this later version – Thielemann, like Karajan, has seldom been one to obsess over such details – but the sense of instrumental soloists and choirs listening and responding to one another is palpable, making the Adagio a genuinely live experience albeit still one suffused with the satisfaction of its own beautiful existence (especially noticeable on Blu ray), and this is my more general problem with Thielemann’s way with the piece, which has overall tightened up since his Munich days but runs along the same broad (sometimes very broad) lines of Gothic splendour.

Remember the days when the Eighth was announced with the spurious tag of ‘The Apocalyptic’? It is not cast in C minor for nothing, and a recent, brisk and uncomplicated LPO performance led by Jukka-Pekka Saraste reminded me that it’s Bruckner’s most troubled completed work, in which the coda to the finale is so hard-won, against all the obstacles towards its resolution that the composer places so determinedly in its path, as sometimes to flaunt hope or defiance rather than fulfilment. You would do well to hear any of this in Thielemann’s performance, and I rather doubt he’d want you to. He no longer comes to a standstill at the turning point of the Adagio and there are sudden surges through the course of the finale, moments exciting in themselves that may in time prove to be part of the evolution of an interpretation but for now feel like tinkering at the edges.