The rude, ripe tastelessness of John Eliot Gardiner’s Berlioz is the perfect antidote to Haitink’s Instagram Bruckner

Conducting is one of those professions — being monarch is perhaps another — where the less you do, the more everyone loves you. Orchestral players, for example, tend not to complain about being let off early from rehearsals. I prefer my maestros to have their head under the bonnet: loosening, tightening, fixing, replacing. Much of the classical music world, however, fetishises the idea of ‘letting the music speak for itself’. As if ‘the music’ were an objective thing. As if the score were a rendering that could be printed out in 3D, rather than a map to be deciphered and interpreted.

This goes some way, I think, to explain the career of Bernard Haitink, who trades on niceness and anonymity — or, as the fan club likes to put it, on being self-effacing. Haitink is adored by orchestras. He’s conducted most of them. He turned 90 in March. His Prom last week with the Vienna Phil, performing Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, was billed as his final engagement in Britain.