Stanisław Skrowaczewski, who died in February 2017 at the age of 93, was a master conductor and much-loved musician whose Bruckner performances were among the most highly regarded of his era.

Recorded in Tokyo on January 21, 2016, this masterly account of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony was not Skrowaczewski’s last – he conducted the symphony in Berlin three months later – but it’s without doubt his most important. Televised live and later republished on YouTube, it’s a performance that has the added merit of offering a masterclass in the rostrum conductor’s art. Skrowaczewski was 92 at the time of this concert, though (a certain Wand-like stoop and shuffle apart) he could be 30 years younger, such is the vitality of the conducting, and its precision. What more can one ask for than a rhythmically exacting right hand (the baton almost as short as Gergiev’s), a left hand that registers those larger expressive sweeps, and a gaze that’s as generous as it’s all-seeing?

Used, no doubt, to having a score on the desk, Skrowaczewski often looks down, but there is no score there. This a symphony whose every detail is fixed in the conductor’s mind and imagination. And in the orchestra’s, too: for this is an immaculately prepared performance, as any score-reader will confirm.

Tokyo boasts no fewer than eight symphony orchestras, of which the Yomiuri Nippon, founded by Nippon TV in 1962, is, on its day, as fine as any. Skrowaczewski was its chief conductor from 2007 to 2010, which may explain why concentration levels operate at around 200 per cent and why conductor and orchestra appear to breathe as one.

There are few strategic differences between this Tokyo performance and Skrowaczewski’s musically unexceptionable 1993 reading with the Saarbrücken RSO (still available separately as an Oehms Classics download). Once again the great slow movement takes its time but never drags (which is exactly what Bruckner asks for), while the finale has all the space it needs, yet impetus, too. You sense that’s what Skrowaczewski had in mind for the finale in Saarbrücken, but it’s only here that we finally get a sense of accelerating excitement at the prospect of the joyous homecoming that’s about to greet us.

To facilitate an Adagio that runs to 29 minutes and a finale that’s done and dusted in 21 (much as Furtwängler’s used to be), Skrowaczewski makes strategic use of the competing editions, observing Nowak’s foreshortenings in the Adagio but observing all Haas’s restorations in the latter part of the finale.

It is good to have all this on CD at last. It’s the same performance as the TV transmission, using what I imagine is the same sound source. That said, the higher fidelity of the CD sound gives the heavyweight low brass – Bruckner’s five tubas and three trombones – a prominence that I came at times to find a touch wearisome.