The symphonic literature holds no greater challenge than Bruckner’s Eighth, which occupied the composer from 1884 to 1892. Early reactions to the score caused him no end of grief. His staunch champion Hermann Levi (remembered as the first conductor of Wagner’s Parsifal), sent Bruckner back to the drawing board, deeming the first manuscript unperformable. After extensive revisions, Munich scheduled the premiere but repeatedly postponed it. When Vienna sprang into the breach, each break between movements brought new defections from the hall; the kingpin critic Eduard Hanslick (whom Wagner caricatured in Die Meistersinger as the insufferable pedant Beckmesser) dismissed the Eighth as “repellent.” Yet posterity came to regard its exploration of spiritual struggle, yearning, and ultimate triumph as one of the most profound works in the symphonic canon. The fact that New York’s two principal orchestras would perform the work in a single week beggars belief. There’s much to hope for from the New York Philharmonic’s interpretation under Semyon Bychkov, a bullet-proof technician who is also a thinker and a seeker (June 4, 5, 6). That may be a hard act for Yves Nézet-Séguin and the Met Orchestra to follow at Carnegie Hall (June 11). Nézet-Séguin isn’t one to lose his nerve; no matter how taxing the assignment, he’s game and he makes it to the finish line. He’s a personable ambassador for the high arts, but he’s no deep diver, and his performances, too often, are lite. Conrad L. Osborne, doyen of American opera critics and standard bearer of the values of an age invested in classical music just as our own is invested in nothing of cultural import, characterized Nézet-Séguin for the ages in his dissection of the Met’s new Tristan und Isolde, “From time to time, I glanced down at Nézet-Séguin and his players,” said Osborne, who perches by choice in the first row of the Family Circle, where the acoustics are best, “and saw him working away with broad, eager gestures like a passionate lecturer at the base of Mt. Rushmore.” —Matthew Gurewitsch