This live Bruckner Eighth performed in Dresden in September 2009 under the direction of Christian Thielemann is of little more than documentary interest. Fabio Luisi, the Staatskapelle Dresden’s principal conductor who, the previous June, had announced that he would be standing down in 2012, had been due to conduct the concert. His indisposition caused an invitation to be sent to Thielemann who was holidaying on Sylt at the end of the Bayreuth season. Since Thielemann himself had recently announced that he would be leaving the Munich Philharmonic in 2011, the Dresden concert took on the character of what Die Zeit dubbed an “outsize conducting trial”. The programme was changed to accommodate Thielemann’s desire to conduct Bruckner’s Eighth. Three weeks later he was named as Luisi’s successor.

As an account of the Eighth, the performance leaves a good deal to be desired. Thielemann’s recent DVD of the Fourth and Seventh symphonies with the Munich Philharmonic (C Major, 8/10) is exceptional but that was recorded some years into his Munich tenure. What we have here is an attempt on the Everest of 19th-century Romantic symphonies by parties who barely know one another. It would be easy to blame the MDR Figaro radio recording for the performance’s lack of “presence”. But microphones relate; they don’t create.

It is not, by the clock, a slow performance but it often feels slow. The reason for this is almost certainly a lack of detailed long-term preparation. Not until the content of every chord and the shape of every phrase have been pondered and rehearsed can the harmonic and rhythmic underpinning of the musical narrative as Thielemann sees it be properly determined.

The lights do go up in the fourth movement, providing that frisson of live music-making which is there throughout Furtwängler’s 1944 VPO radio performance (Andromeda) and Barbirolli’s 1970 London account with the Hallé (BBC Legends, 10/01). There is, however, nothing organic about this Dresden reading whose peroration, unsurprisingly, is less a consummation, more an essay in opportunistic stage-management.