Bar 177 in the slow movement of Bruckner’s Symphony no.7 is the stuff of controversy.

Do you pay triangle and cymbal players to sit through the hour-plus course of the work just to add one note to the movement’s painfully-achieved climax?

Or do you dispense with their services, knowing that the music will make its effect anyway.

I’m with the triangle/cymbals on this one, as the triangle can add extra thrills even to the most luminous climax. Others argue differently, as they are entitled, and Bruckner was notoriously a ditherer over definitive details of his own scores.

I just hope that Andris Nelsons dispensed with the extra percussionists’ services on Thursday for his own artistic reasons, and not through being leaned on financially.

His was a well-shaped, structurally sensitive reading of this glorious work, glowingly Wagnerian (I have never heard the quartet of Wagner tubas sound so significant) while at the same time relishing passages where the violins sound so elfin.

There was a wonderful sense of release as the opening movement eased into its recapitulation as Nelsons so patiently delineated the music’s architecture, and the extended coda’s dynamics were so well-managed over the tension-building timpani roll.

And out of all the orchestral contributions special mention must be made of Marie-Christine Zupancic’s flute, now fluttering like a dove, now radiant as a halo.

Around her and oboist Rainer Gibbons the woodwind section is rebuilding itself into the strength it once possessed, and it was good to welcome Oliver Janes, the 23-year-old grandson of John Fuest, one-time principal clarinet of the CBSO, into his grandfather’s chair.

The Schumann Piano Concerto could not have been a better choice for his debut in the position, full of poignant dialogue between clarinet and piano, and Janes certainly had a formidable collaborator in Stephen Hough, whose pianism combined authority with spontaneous generosity of phrasing.

Naturally Nelsons and the CBSO accompanied totally in sympathy, and it’s good to know that Hyperion recorded this performance, renewing their award-winning partnership of Hough with the orchestra.

And for once I approved of the inclusion of an encore, the E-flat Nocturne by Chopin, totally appropriate in view of Schumann’s massive encouragement of his contemporary.