Classical Music on Record: Bruckner Symphony No 7

City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra / Sir Simon Rattle (EMI 5 56425 2)

This is the first of Rattle's Bruckner to make it onto disc and the sound of it is very specific. It's the sound of contemplation, aspiration, affirmation. It's indistinct to begin with - it always is. That distant horizon - the point of no return - is glimpsed through a haze of expectation. In the beginning was mystery.

But the first magisterial fortissimo is revealing, fulfilling. Because a Bruckner fortissimo is something unique - broad, blended, euphonious - and Rattle understands that. He understands that awe is different from awesome, that overwhelming is different from overbearing, that the Bruckner tutti is not top-heavy, brass-heavy, that it never coarsens, that the light of understanding is in the wholesomeness.

Right from the start, the evolution of that most glorious of all Bruckner's melodic entreaties conveys a certainty and a truth that is no sooner heard than recognised. The amplitude of the CBSO strings has everything to do with phrasing, not sound. Phrases are carried forward, followed through, sustained, completed. Evolution. And even the barest stretches of Bruckner's transitional syntax are tended as though they really mean something. And they do, of course. Bruckner was a simple but profoundly spiritual man. He didn't say anything he didn't mean. And sometimes the less he says - even to silence and near-silence - the more he succeeds in saying.

Rattle always takes him at his word. The first movement's mysterious darkenings - post-recapitulation and pre-coda (where the principal subject modulates into a kind of half-light over the distant thunder of timpani) - are full of wonder. So too the great Adagio - truly a song of songs with simple mainstream harmonies suddenly sounding as revelatory as the addition of a second line to a medieval monody. But that's Rattle for you. Every harmony, every counterpoint, is there for a reason, and he needs to know why.

In the closing measures of the movement, news of Wagner's death brings a committal (in horns and Wagner-tubas, naturally) as noble and far-reaching as anything in Bruckner. But there is life beyond it - of that Rattle leaves us in no doubt. His feet (as were Bruckner's) are planted firmly on the ground. And from there, on this evidence, he's once more the master of all he surveys. Outstanding.