...in the evening I took Daphne Muir to the second Courtauld concert.  The Bach suite in D. Anton Bruckner's 8th symphony.  The conductor was Otto Klemperer.  He was very good and played Bach overture, as Daphne said, as if it were by Beethoven.  Before the air there was an outburst of anxious coughing.  He waited, grew impatient; turned and scythed the audience with such a look.  Then he went to the air played twice as slow as ever I have heard it before, and extremely ode on a grecian urn-like.  The Bruckner I found hard to stomach.  It is all mental music, weak and scrappy and forever going up to climaxes and down again like someone industriously practising scales.  But the scherzo is good - all the best true wandervogel german romantic manner, a great deal of satisfied repetition and a ravishing oboe slippery tangle in the trio. 

As for the slow movement, I thought it would never end.  It was like being in such a slow train with so many stops that one becomes convinced that one has passed one's station.