From the Fest­spiel­haus Baden-Baden 2008: As part of the Whit­sun Fest­iv­al, Chris­ti­an Thiele­mann and the Münch­ner Phil­har­monik­er per­form Bruck­ner’s “Ro­mantic” Sym­phony, No. 4. One of the most saught-after Wag­n­er-con­duct­ors shows once again his first-rate tal­ent in giv­ing life to the huge struc­tures of Bruck­ner's sym­phon­ic work.

He nat­ur­ally man­ages the con­stantly chan­ging cres­cendi and de­cres­cendi, as well as he suc­ceeds in turn­ing the ti­ni­est sound themes aud­ible. The me­lodi­ous bal­an­cing of the strings and the horns, and the dy­nam­ic wind­ing up of the or­ches­tra sound from a chased pi­an­is­simo to a full for­tis­simo are very con­vin­cing.

"To com­pre­hend Bruck­ner well and truly", says Thiele­mann, "one has to get in­to the slow­ness at first - his mu­sic is not really fiery. This means for the listen­er of today the re­dis­cov­ery of slow­ness. In­ev­it­ably he will then find out, that the slow­ness ac­tu­ally feeds an in­cred­ble fire. However, it blazes un­der the sur­face."