A recent live performance of Bruckner’s longer and more wayward original version of the Eighth Symphony (1887, ed Nowak) has thrown the 1890 revision (Haas) into the sharpest relief for me: how much more organic it feels and how unsurprising it is that most conductors – including Mario Venzago in this thoughtful, sometimes inspiring account – adopt it now as a matter of course.

Venzago’s performance feels organic in that tempo choices and phrasings are fluent and spontaneous. There is a convincing balance between action and repose where, in the case of the latter, magic descends in rapt contemplation and the atmosphere becomes palpable: as in the oboe’s response to solo horn over tremolando strings at the start of the first-movement development (what a plangent tone the Berlin Konzerthaus Orchestra’s principal oboe has) or the quite extraordinary two-part Trio of the Scherzo, where a mysterious hush divines where one part ends and the other so unexpectedly begins. There is, too, a sound balance between Bruckner the God-fearing everyman and Bruckner the visionary, though it has to be said that the climax of the first-movement development might have arrived with more shock and awe in the trombones, and the so-called Annunciation of Death moment in stark, untriumphal trumpet fanfares might have been more strident and chilling. I suppose what I am really saying is that Venzago lacks that last degree of excitement in the big moments.

The heart and soul of the piece, though, resides in the great slow movement and from the moment the gently pulsating opening bars steal into our consciousness it is clear that Venzago will have the measure of it. The introduction of the second idea emerges from somewhere very personal, and time and again – and this is true throughout the performance – Venzago points up the harmony in such a way as to seemingly unlock it for the first time. The Konzerthaus Orchestra play most beautifully, inward and impassioned by turns, in this slow movement – the impulses of the music sound very human and the climax arrives with a flash of cymbals and the blinding light of trumpets.

I like, too, the impulsiveness of the Four Horsemen opening to the finale; and nor does it go unnoticed how deftly Venzago moves through one or two tricky transitions. I am puzzled why the horns don’t come through with the scherzo motif at the start of the summating coda but it’s a performance, not least the slow movement, that demands to be heard.