Lopez-Cobos is a not inexperienced Brucknerian and on the evidence of this record the Cincinnati Symphony is not without competence, expertise even, in playing a score like the Seventh Symphony. But as a collectable library version of the work, this would come some way down any shortlist principally because it lacks the last, or often at times the mediant, degree of tension, weight, imagination, colour, or what you will. Cincinnati is neither Berlin nor Dresden nor Vienna when it comes to Bruckner playing, nor has Lopez-Cobos the multi-national talented interpretative pedigree of the American-born, Swedish-trained, and for many years Dresden-domiciled Herbert Blomstedt, whose Denon CD is as good a Seventh as there is, though perhaps lacking an imaginative dimension that makes the recently reissued 1971 EMI Karajan recording (rather than the tauter 1975 DG version), a very necessary complement to the Blomstedt. Lopez-Cobos, too, often lets the Cincinnati players lapse into a rather cool style that is better suited to Copland than Bruckner. The opening of the slow movement for example, is rather monochrome dynamically and literal in phrasing, the fabulous F sharp major subject is not levitated as it always was by Karajan with a mixture of loftiness and charm (and the horns rather boom out in the transition, marked pp). As for the movement's great climax, it is prepared for in a very packaged short-breathed, comma'd-off way. There is no cymbal clash at the summit in this performance, but perhaps it is as well since the build-up could barely have borne such a Lohengrin-like gesture of light-filled spiritual aspiration and glimmering splendour.
As for the Denon recording, one or two miscalculations of balance apart, it looks loyally, calmly, impassively on.'