The first time I heard a Bruckner symphony in the concert hall was back in 1990, as part of the celebrations that inaugurated the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall. The city scored a major coup that year by getting the Berlin Philharmonic to play two concerts under Kurt Sanderling. The second of these – every moment of which is seared into my brain – featured Mozart's Fourth Violin Concerto, played with dazzling warmth and delicacy by Frank Peter Zimmermann – and then, after the interval, Bruckner's Third Symphony.

As a dutiful and slightly obsessed teenager, driven to devouring as much classical music as I could get my ears around, I had read up on Anton Bruckner before the concert. From the strange countenance that stared out from the pages of the Collins Encyclopedia of Music, Bruckner seemed to be an elderly, otherworldy 19th-century peasant, wearing loose-fitting clothes and sitting in a gloomy room in Vienna at a grand piano. The book's description of his symphonies as some of the longest and oddest ever written didn't fill me with confidence, and neither did the notion that his life's work (nine and a bit symphonies, choral masses, motets, and a smattering of pieces in other genres) was simply a musical realisation of his devout Catholic faith. None of that made me think my life was about to change in the concert hall.

But then the Third Symphony started. And out of a cosmic mist of D minor arpeggios, a stately trumpet melody began, which built to an ear-bleeding climax – I was sitting just above the double-basses and the brass section – that shook the hall to its newly built foundations and made my brain and being shudder. The rest of the huge, 25 minute-long first movement passed as an almost hallucinogenic vision, not so much a piece of music as a sublime landscape, by turns nightmarish and consoling. The music lurched from the depths of abyssal terror in its huge, minor-key climaxes to gentle, song-like string writing, but the movement ended with the most thrillingly, obsessively dark music I had ever heard.

I was in a shocked trance for the rest of the piece and the next three movements. At the end, as the symphony at last found a transcendent major-key fanfare, I felt battered, bruised and elated. It was a surprise to look around at the applauding masses and realise the world was still turning, to walk outside the concert hall and see that life appeared to be going on as normal. But my musical life, at least, was never the same again.

Talking about my Brucknerian conversion to friends and musicians, I'm often taken aback that his symphonies don't have the same narcotic effect on everyone. But if you're reading this thinking you don't like Bruckner much, you're in good company. In his lifetime, he was set up as the Viennese polar opposite of Brahms, a Wagnerian symphonist for the contemporary avant garde to hold against Brahms's classicism. Pitted against the combined forces of Vienna's musical establishment in the late 19th century, Bruckner never stood much of a chance.

When he conducted the Vienna Philharmonic in the premiere of the Third Symphony in 1877, the leading critic Eduard Hanslick described the piece as "a vision of Beethoven's Ninth [that had] made friends with Wagner's Walküre and wound up trampled under the hooves of their horses". Hanslick liked the Eighth even less, if that was possible: "Interminable, disorganised, and violent, Bruckner's Eighth Symphony stretches out into a hideous length … It is not impossible the future belongs to this nightmarish style, a future we therefore do not envy." Gustav Dömpke, writing in 1886, a decade before Bruckner's death, wrote one of the masterpieces of musical vitriol of all time about the composer: "We recoil in horror before this rotting odour which rushes into our nostrils from the disharmonies of this putrefactive counterpoint. His imagination is so incurably sick and warped that anything like regularity in chord progressions and period structure simply do not exist for him. Bruckner composes like a drunkard!" Brahms summed up the anti-Bruckner position most succinctly of all, saying that he didn't write symphonies at all, but rather "symphonic boa constrictors".

Ironically, it's exactly the things Bruckner's fiercest critics hate that his devotees admire so much: the scale, the uniqueness of his harmony, the new kind of symphonic form he developed, the spiritual journeys he creates. But there's a dark side to being a Brucknerophile. It's arguable that the Nazis did more to co-opt Bruckner to their ideology than they did even Wagner. There's a chilling photograph of Hitler unveiling a bust of Bruckner in the Valhalla at Regensburg in 1937. That year, Hitler chose to end the Nazi's annual Nuremberg rally with a performance of the gigantic finale of Bruckner's Fifth Symphony; and when news of the Führer's death was announced in 1945, it wasn't Wagner that was played over German airwaves, but the slow movement of Bruckner's Seventh.

The Nazis had an opportunity to remake Bruckner in their own image. His biography is short on detail, apart from his career as an organist and teacher, his obsessive study of the arcana of musical theory (especially counterpoint, the art of matching different musical voices with one another), and his occasional, ill-starred attempts at the seduction of young girls. Bruckner never married, and almost certainly died a virgin. He left no writings or theoretical tracts of any substance, and so was a blank canvas on which the Third Reich could paint their vision of a völkisch Wagnerian symphonist.

Since the war, something strange has happened to the performance practice of Bruckner's symphonies. More and more, conductors have made the monumental, monolithic aspects of Bruckner's symphonies the defining feature of the music. At their best, there's a meditative, intoxicating quality to the mesmerically slow speeds of performances by such conductors as Herbert von Karajan and especially Sergiu Celibidache, but with less accomplished maestros, Bruckner is reduced to a weirdly one-dimensional architect of sound. Too often these days, his music is performed by conductors who unthinkingly take their cue from the slow speeds of the school of performance that sees Bruckner as a pseudo-spiritual-guru, as if the music were a static marble sculpture rather than a living, breathing organism.

At the Southbank Centre in London this year, there's a season-long chance to see where we are now in the story of Bruckner interpretation, with performances of six of the symphonies. The season starts with Claudio Abbado conducting the Lucerne Festival Orchestra in the Fifth, a performance – that should sing and soar like no other before or since – of Bruckner's most contrapuntally ambitious symphony. It ends next April, when Daniel Barenboim conducts the last three symphonies with his Staatskapelle Berlin. I'm hoping we'll hear a more dynamic Bruckner from Abbado and Barenboim, as well as Vladimir Jurowski, Osmo Vänskä and the Southbank's other Brucknerians. Recent recordings by Roger Norrington, Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Jonathan Nott have revealed a different side to Bruckner, interpretations that make him a human being rather than a self-annihilating penitent.

But here's the biggest Brucknerian irony of all. You can experience the most dynamic vision of Bruckner in recorded history in performances given by Wilhelm Furtwängler, including some during the second world war with the Nazi-sponsored Berlin Philharmonic. There's a performance of the Fifth Symphony from 1942 that is still shockingly intense, vital and energetic. For anyone who thinks Bruckner only wrote slow, static, boa-constricting music, this is the performance to hear. There's an intensity and wildness Furtwängler finds that flatly contradicts the monolithic vision Hitler and Goebbels had of the composer. It's an energy and fearlessness today's conductors need to recover in their approach to Bruckner to do justice to the musical and existential revelations at the heart of each of his symphonies.