I was struck while watching this latest instalment of Christian Thielemann’s video Bruckner cycle how much camera movement there is under Agnes Méth’s direction. Sound and picture quality are exemplary, but it seems that every third shot involves the picture moving left or right, zooming in or out, floating over the orchestra as if suspended from a balloon or featuring a slow crossfade from one camera to another. To be fair, such techniques are common practice in video recordings of concerts these days and are indeed a feature of Méth’s direction of the same symphony conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra in 1996. It’s not something that bothered me when watching the earlier concert, an engrossing performance under the 82-year-old Giulini’s direction, but I found it somehow distracting when listening to Thielemann’s new performance.

A further play of the disc without the visuals brought little additional satisfaction, however. Thielemann solicits playing of typical warmth and richness from the Dresden orchestra, the woodwinds in particular on fine form. Tempi are well chosen and steady in the outer movements, leading inexorably to a powerful presentation of the Adagio’s dissonant climax, and there’s no want of energy and bite in the Scherzo. At the same time, the performance gives the impression of being borne on a surface current far removed from the seismic cataclysms potentially occurring in the ocean depths far below. With none of the various completions of the symphony’s finale being part of Thielemann’s vision of the work, the Adagio concludes with an E major serenity that seems here a little too easily won.