"They played like gods," Bruckner once wrote of the Vienna Philharmonic. To the end, his admiration for the orchestra remained boundless though, during his lifetime, it was far from mutual.

Like many of his contemporaries, the players found his music incomprehensible. In 1873, he offered them the dedication of his Second symphony. Two years elapsed before they rather grudgingly accepted. Even then, it would seem, Bruckner never received their reply and their name was left off the published score.

They remain one of the world's most outstanding Bruckner orchestras, but one is forced to wonder if inclusion of the work in their London concert under Seiji Ozawa represents, in some respects, a posthumous mending of fences.

The Second is not quite a masterpiece, though it's a fascinating, pivotal work. Bruckner hadn't quite found his feet. Yet the mature symphonist's voice is already audible. The questing chorale of the slow movement pre-empts the ecstatic lyricism of the Seventh symphony.

The driven, slamming rhythms of the scherzo contain in embryo the corresponding movement of the Ninth. The sense of a vast architectonic structure is very much in place, although at times the lack of cohesion in the work's disparate elements and influences becomes evident - the melodic contours which peer back to Schubert, the conscious debt to Wagner and the shimmering strings of Lohengrin in particular.

Ozawa's handling of this tricky score has an intermittent brilliance, and a certain nervous edginess, audible at the outset in the twitchy string motif with which the piece opens.

Spirituality is all-important in Bruckner, though Ozawa sees the Second as being as much about doubt as it is about faith. For the most part, he keeps the work in earthbound turmoil, allowing us only rare glimpses of metaphysical transcendence.

However, when they come, as at the end of the Andante, the effect is breathtaking. Occasionally the pacing comes adrift: the finale, over-long on Bruckner's part, is particularly difficult to get right.

Ozawa pushes too hard too soon and comes dangerously close to bombast in the closing bars. I wouldn't follow Bruckner's lead in putting the playing in the "divine" bracket, but it was fairly staggering, all rich, resonant brass and mellow woodwind.

Before the interval, we were given a treat in the form of Haydn's 39th symphony. You don't automatically associate Ozawa with the 18th century repertoire, but his interpretation on this occasion was uncommonly fine - terse and aphoristic, undercutting aristocratic stateliness and refined wit with tensely reined-in emotion.

He succeeded finding in Haydn those extraordinary moments that still take you completely by surprise: the melodic and rhythmic ingenuity; the sudden endings when the music seem to evaporate into silence. The playing was exemplary, and the suave beauty of the Vienna strings could be heard to perfection.