What we have here is a robust and eloquent account of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, its general manner not dissimilar to that of Stanisław Skrowaczewski’s revered 1993 recording with the Hallé Orchestra.

The principal difference lies in the nature of the orchestral sound, though not for the reasons billed by Harmonia Mundi in its press release and CD cover puff, both of which make Bruckner sound like Reznicek in ecclesiastical garb. ‘Thanks to the use of period instruments’, we’re told, this ‘cathedral in sound’ is able to ‘regain its lightness and elegance in dazzling orchestral colours’.

‘Regain’? Not the least of the glories of this Anima Eterna Brugge performance is the skill with which its musicians deploy many of the same instruments, played at much the same pitch, at similar tempos and with similar modes of articulation to those that have been deployed by the Vienna Philharmonic these past 140 years. And using the same text, too; in the last 60 years conductors engaged by the Philharmonic have regularly used the 1878/80 Nowak Urtext deployed here.

I’m surprised that the performance’s distinguished conductor, Pablo Heras-Casado, wasn’t more specific about all this in his several pre-release interviews. No word about the horns, for instance, though I can think of no symphony in which the horns – specifically the unique ‘Vienna’ horn designed and built by Leopold Uhlmann during Bruckner’s lifetime – play so decisive a role.

Anima Eterna Brugge’s first and second horns are original Uhlmann instruments dating from the late 1870s; the other two are also contemporary Uhlmann-school instruments. The difficulties posed by the Vienna horn’s singular design means that what we hear is a 50 50 mix of instrument and player. In Vienna this has resulted in techniques handed down across the generations from fathers to sons and teachers to pupils. It also explains why this Bruges Bruckner Fourth won’t necessarily sound the same as, say, Christian Thielemann’s Vienna recording, for which I expressed comparable enthusiasm in 2021.

Playing styles alter with time. Principal horn Roland Berger was the great game-changer in Vienna in the early 1960s. Certainly, the famous opening horn call has a fresher feel, with a cleaner drop – B flat down to E flat – in the Böhm, Abbado and Thielemann recordings than it does on the earliest extant Vienna Philharmonic recordings of the symphony under Furtwängler and Knappertsbusch. The Bruges players, interestingly, adopt the mellower, more legato manner (marked ausdrucksvoll – ‘expressive’ – in older editions) of those 1950s Vienna recordings. Both approaches are valid, though where the Bruges players’ unmarked swell on the opening high B flat comes from isn’t clear. It’s not in Nowak.

That, and the slightly congested sound of the first big tutti, raised early doubts: unnecessarily so, as it happens. With the right kind of instruments to hand, Heras-Casado understands well the nature of Bruckner’s orchestrations. He also has the necessary drive and structural awareness to ensure that the music remains forward-moving and of a piece, an increasing rarity these days in Bruckner interpretation.

The result is a performance distinguished by a bold and purposeful first movement, a nicely contemplative yet never inert Andante and a splendidly bracing horn-led Scherzo whose beguilingly rustic Trio benefits greatly from the unvarnished beauty of the Bruges woodwind and brass.

‘Period’ strings can be a problem in post-Classical music, but not here, given the weight of massed string sound Heras-Casado commands, and the cultivation of something close to a true legato – a sine qua non in a score whose string parts are laden with Bruckner’s repeated instruction lang gezogen (‘long-drawn’).

The finale was work in progress for Bruckner, yet it’s wonderfully doable, provided it’s not taken too quickly. A useful test point is the quaint woodwind-led rustic dance at fig C (bar 105, 3'36"), whose scoring caused problems for Bruckner in the symphony’s earlier versions. Heras-Casado and his players handle this to perfection, as they do the deep calm and pealing alleluias of the symphony’s end.