This is as fine a recorded account of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony as I’ve heard for some time, both in terms of Lahav Shani’s conception of the music and its realisation on the orchestra. It’s a performance that grows movement by movement, stable of pulse, yet flexible and free-flowing within the boundaries of the larger whole.

It’s an approach that makes for an interesting contrast with the various recorded accounts of the piece by one of Shani’s mentors, Daniel Barenboim. As Rob Cowan noted when reviewing Barenboim’s live 2010 Staatskapelle Berlin recording, Barenboim can be leading what appears to be a pitch-perfect account of the symphony when ‘quite out of the blue, something unexpected might happen that catches you off your guard, such as a sudden acceleration or slowing down, or a startling crescendo’.

Such effects rarely work well on record, especially in this symphony whose tonalities flow so naturally one to the other. In this respect, it’s odd that Shani’s recording is listed as being ‘ed Nowak 1954’, the edition (unlike the 1944 Haas preferred by Blomstedt, Karajan, Wand and others) which acknowledges many of the meddlesome tempo modifications inserted by Joseph Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe ahead of the original printing of 1885. I should add that Shani prefers marginally quicker tempos than Barenboim: measured, yet with that all-important direction of travel never lost from view.

If I have a reservation, it concerns the famous ‘cockcrow’ Scherzo and its summertime Trio. For whatever reason, it seems a touch laboured. A marginally quicker pulse and lighter texture – the kind of thing we have on Blomstedt’s widely collected 1980 Dresden recording – would have led us more naturally towards Shani’s grand yet finely pointed account of Bruckner’s magnificently judged finale.

If blind tastings were as much the thing in the music business as they are in the wine trade, I doubt whether many would guess the identity of the superb Bruckner ensemble Shani has fashioned, along with the sound palette – Rembrandt-like would be a fair description – he and his Rotterdam players have created for this music. The recording, made for Warner Classics by Polyhymnia International, is superb.