Seiji Ozawa draws a rich, dark, weighty – albeit meticulously balanced – sound from the Saito Kinen Orchestra for this new Bruckner Seventh. It is a lyrical performance, broadly based, though not, when measured by the clock, a particularly slow one. Ozawa leads unexceptional readings of the first and third movements and delivers a beautifully shaped account of the finale: witty, grand and skilfully paced. There is a somewhat sluggish feel to the first half of the great Adagio, the lovely F sharp subject in 3/4 time oddly earthbound, but the ascent to the summit (from fig S, 15’26”) is powerful and the Wagner threnody which concludes the movement is nobly realised by the Saito Kinen brass.

The performance was made, so the small print reveals, during the 2003 Saito Kinen Festival. Since there is applause at the end and more of Ozawa’s yoga-like inhalations than we would expect to hear in the studio, it would seem that this is a patchwork of mainly live takes subsequently stitched together. (The booklet gives September 10-14 as the recording dates but makes no mention of the performance being live.) What emerges largely hangs together, though the edit points are not particularly well disguised, something which undermines one’s sense of the performance as a living entity. This is an SACD multi-channel surround sound recording. I heard it in the standard two-channel form which is full, spacious and clear.