Symphony no. 7

"Any lover of great orchestral music making will want this DVD, for it shows Claudio Abbado ... collaborating with a collection of players who go to Lucerne specifically to play together and with, rather than under, him".

"With excellent sound, together with camerawork that is for the most part pertinent to the music and its performance, this DVD captures the high-profile occasion without distraction ... Focused and vital, well versed in one sense but with no sense of familiarity breeding contempt, Brendel engages with the interiority of the music ... The orchestra's rich but never cloying timbres prove ideal for Bruckner".

"Vurdering: Gramophone choice" - "With the closing bars of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony echoing around the resonant acoustic of the Semperoper, the audience seems reluctant to break the music's spell ... And he certainly earned the adulatory applause. A sequence of Hugo Wolf songs ... proves Thielemann to be the most sensitive and responsive of accompanists ... Fleming is in glorious voice".

"Barenboim seems to draw the music spontaneously from the players rather than imposing control ... Fulsomely captured by the recording quality, these extended journeys reveal more Brucknerian truths than most".

"Celibidache (now seated) paints a noble musical canvas on the broadest possible scale, one which convinced Brucknerians will find engrossing. Nothing is forced and no detail of internal balance and phrasing is overlooked ... This is not a performance for those who prefer an adrenalin-pumping experience (even in Bruckner), but it is unquestionably a great recording taken on its own terms. The Berliners play like angels, the performance has never looked or sounded finer".

"The problem with the Berlin Philharmonic Seventh is that, for all its monumentality ... the procession of phrases is so terribly slow, wifully so at times, that you wonder whether Celibidache was out to prove a point ... It's almost as if Celibidache is posing as a sort of Brucknerian Glenn Gould ... The level of excess relegates this extraordinary Berlin performance to the level of a historically significant curio".

"Although the film is watchable enough to see the dedication of the orchestra and the undemonstrative concentration of Welser-Möst, it is the ears (and the senses beyond those) that appreciate the all-consuming rightness of much of this performance".

"This is a wonderful performance of Bruckner's most popular symphony, delivered in what appears to be a building with ideal acoustics".

Vurdering (performance): 5/5.

Vurdering (picture & sound): 5/5.