His movements are minimal (perhaps they always were). A more intense flick of the baton, a sudden wider sweep of the expressive left hand, can help quicken a tempo, draw extra firepower from the players, but Bernard Haitink's conducting is still the most unforced and, well, musicianly, in the world. His decision to retire from official concert-giving - a "sabbatical", his biography says - after the season in which he celebrated his 90th birthday with two LSO concerts in March means we'll miss him terribly. But it was a timely gesture, like everything he's ever done. This Prom will not be forgotten.
Having the Vienna Philharmonic to lay down the red carpet for him was a special luxury in Bruckner. Oddly, the Fourth with the LSO earlier this year was a more emotional experience than this Seventh, for me, at least, partly because it's a symphony that's so much harder to succeed in (and there was proof that no-one can really make Bruckner's worst finale work). I sensed more behind the eyes and between the ears of the Concertgebouw, too, when he conducted this, the best-loved Bruckner, on the Dutch orchestra's visit to the Barbican some years back. Yet it remains the most natural of interpretations, moving the first-movement exposition forwards, but without any rush, in a way that uniquely binds its diverse material together. Haitink barely needs to conduct his woodwind (two women in there now, none among the brass); I'll not easily forget his words to young conducting students in Lucerne last year - "trust the players; they know much more than you do".
He refuses to smooth out the noble string hymn of the Adagio, keeping the first three notes of their response accented as the score indicates and relatively light so that the expressive beans aren't spilled too soon. How the big crescendo here quickened and unfurled with those sudden urgencies of conducting style, towards an unforced climax where the (optional) cymbal crash had no hint of forced rhetoric about it. And does any Wagner tuba section (horns five to eight) intone more nobly or perfectly - pitch in these instruments is notoriously wayward - than that of the Vienna Philharmonic? If the scherzo was more stately than fiery, that helped to ensure that the finale truly crowned the work. This was perhaps the biggest revelation of a remarkable evening, the Haydnesque radiance of the start counterbalanced by the massive unisons. The biggest emotion of all was saved for the coda, the last mountain peak always in sight for Haitink the master of long-term argument.
With Emanuel Ax replacing Murray Perahia in Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, we simply got another master of effortless space in perfect dialogue with Haitink and his players, the seemingly effortless injection of air into phrases common to both.What a pleasure it was to stand among totally quiet, attentive Prommers for this half. Liszt's famous image for the most remarkable and perhaps the shortest of great slow movements - Orpheus taming the Furies - gave way to that of a civilized conversation between two very different personalities (the sterner of the two impersonated by the orchestra on this occasion). And the finale was sheer, effortless joy, the carefully-regulated orchestral poundings a reminder that even a few years ago Haitink still had the energy to electrify in that symphonic "apotheosis of the dance", Beethoven's Seventh. Ax's encore, Schubert's A flat Impromptu, was one of ineffable perfection, and might have been a portrait of Haitink in music: understatedly noble, radiant - as he certainly seemed when I met him in Lucerne - and self-deprecating. At least it gave the conductor respite from taking another bow. Many were expected at the end of the Bruckner, and yielded the moving spectacle of the Vienna Philharmonic's concertmaster for the evening, Volkhardt Steude, giving the master his arm to lead him off and bring him back to the platform - a final image of total collegiality and mutual respect. If this was indeed Haitink's last UK concert - and who knows, he may be back to step in for a younger conductor, or to give a masterclass with the London students he values so much - it was the most humane and glowing way possible for him to take his leave.