There was a pleasing simplicity about the Glasshouse’s Big Bruckner Weekend. Five concerts, five major works, just one composer. You went big or you went home, and in truth that’s usually the deal with old Anton; in the words of the The Bluffer’s Guide to Music: ‘Bruckner just didn’t write pleasant little recommendable pieces.’ But it was striking how much more manageable he felt in this context. With a single work per concert, even the most obstinate Brucknerphobe was confronted with no more than 80 minutes of music at a sitting. No distractions, then – with the added sweetener of hearing a state-of-the-nation showcase of four leading British orchestras before teatime on Sunday.

It certainly made for a fascinating thought experiment. It’s Bruckner’s bicentenary year, and this lonely, visionary master still seems as divisive as ever. Richard Morrison, in the Times, recently called him a ‘Marmite composer’, and it’s disturbingly easy to find music-lovers who’ll tell you, with a hint of pride, that they detest his work. If only it were that simple. In my experience, few composers have as powerful a capacity to draw you into a world of transcendent poetry and wonder in one work, and then to refuse emotional admittance in another. Great musicians have spoken of the Eighth Symphony with tears in their eyes, but I’ve only ever glimpsed shadows of the marvels they describe. And yet the first time I ever played Bruckner’s String Quintet, I struggled to keep my bow on the string: my hands were shaking at so much beauty.

It’s disturbingly easy to find music-lovers who’ll tell you that they detest Bruckner’s work

The Gateshead weekend began with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and the Seventh Symphony, conducted by Domingo Hindoyan. Hindoyan is possibly the most interesting of the recent crop of UK-based music directors, and a Barenboim protégé to boot, so it’s hard to say why this performance didn’t quite ignite. It wasn’t the daringly swift tempi of the Scherzo and Finale (Bruckner can take a surprising amount of flexibility in that department). Somehow, it felt as if Hindoyan was hypnotised by the symphony’s loveliness – polishing and caressing those long, aspiring melodies without concerning himself unduly with what lay beneath. As Sibelius once said of Thomas Beecham, it sounded as if he was conducting from a first-violin part.

On Saturday, Mark Elder directed the Hallé in the Eighth Symphony. This conductor and orchestra are always a treasurable pairing these days, and the playing was exquisite. Elder had all nine horn players – including the four who doubled on Wagner tuba – seated in a single row, and together they sounded like they’d been caught by the setting sun. Wrangling those beasts is no joke (nicknames for the Wagner tuba among orchestral players include ‘disaster horn’ and ‘catastrophone’); but on this occasion they were nearly flawless – a telling indicator of the overall level of concentration. A Wagner conductor of Elder’s stature is exactly what Bruckner’s colossal structure demands, and I still can’t say why this symphony eludes me. But I’m reasonably sure that on this occasion it wasn’t the performance.

The following morning it was the turn of the home team: five string players from the Royal Northern Sinfonia played the String Quintet in the chamber-music hall. The audience was at near-capacity, and their response was enthusiastic. Naturally enough. It’s an astonishingly tender work, played here with finesse and evident affection. Reservations about Bruckner tend to melt in the face of the Quintet, and you could hear why.

Finally, on Sunday afternoon, the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra played the unfinished Ninth Symphony. Alpesh Chauhan conducted – an artist barely in his thirties who finds Bruckner even more compelling than those old crowd-pleasers Mahler and Shostakovich. The BBCSSO played for him with a dark, burning intensity; not as luxurious, perhaps, as the Hallé, but with an elemental force (great black banks of brass rearing out of yearning string textures) that made a devastating overall impact. I can’t say that the weekend resolved all my issues with this most frustrating and rewarding of late-romantic symphonists, but one thing was unambiguously clear. We need to keep listening.

Anyway, that was Tyneside. If you’re in the vicinity of London, there’s still time to catch the latest revival of Simon McBurney’s gloriously grungy ENO production of The Magic Flute. It’s as life-enhancing as ever, with Sarah Tynan as a guileless and affecting Pamina and John Relyea, as Sarastro, producing a sound that must be at least 80 per cent cocoa solids. Erina Yashima conducts, but the show is the star, really: a compassionate, deliriously inventive celebration not just of Enlightenment values, but of the whole art of opera and all the people who make it. That the ENO’s entire company delivers it with such verve, after the misery they’ve had to endure in recent months, is a miracle worthy of Mozart himself.