Royal Festival Hall, London
Increasingly frail now, the 84-year-old German conductor Kurt Masur is one of those podium veterans who nevertheless manage to obtain orchestral playing of stripped-to-essentials clarity. This was immediately apparent in the Philharmonia's unobtrusive but neatly shaped accompaniment to Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. It also greatly suited the crisply articulated phrasing of Arabella Steinbacher who, like Masur, avoided grand gestures while giving a thoroughly unified account of this most lyrical of concertos.
Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, which came after the interval, would not strike many as a work that holds back on the grand gestures. Yet Bruckner's is the music of a solitary man as well as a fervent Catholic believer. And there is what could be called a Protestant school of Bruckner conducting, of which Otto Klemperer was an outstanding example. Masur is clearly also a follower, always at pains to keep the music within earthly bounds.
He did this by maintaining a steady, moderately brisk pulse through the two opening movements, and by rigorously avoiding the musical equivalent of stopping to look at the view. The orchestra was kept on a tight rein throughout. Masur's Bruckner is always moving through those massive harmonies into the next passage, even at the crux of the adagio – no cymbal clash for the austere Masur there, naturally – so that the bleak chorale of mourning for Wagner, which follows, sounded more organic and less of an authorial addendum.
The great virtue of this restrained approach is that it emphasises Bruckner's sense of structure and rhythmic pulse, particularly notable in the scherzo, as well as permitting you to hear the wealth of instrumental detail in the score. Fascinating and memorable, yes – but in the end (especially for anyone who has Claudio Abbado's Bruckner fifth from last October still in their head) definitely not the full story.