Returning to Riccardo Chailly's Decca recording of this attractive early Bruckner symphony has been a greater pleasure than encountering Eliahu Inbal's rather unimaginative challenge to it. No one can pretend that this is a finished masterpiece, but in Chailly's ripe and characterful performance—even riper, I would now think, than Haitink's fine 1966 Philips account (nla)—there is a huge amount to enjoy. The differences show from the very outset. Where Inbal's projection of the opening paragraph is rather low-key and pedestrian, Chailly is almost impertinently purposeful. And Chailly's sophisticated control of dynamics only adds to one's pleasure. Inbal shows more dash in the Scherzo (marked Presto, a direction Haitink rather pointedly ignored) but the playing isn't particularly characterful and Chailly follows a brisk Scherzo with a beguilingly lazy siesta of a Trio. There is relish in the finale, too, with Chailly bringing out as none of his rivals has done the ecclesiastical charm of the slow introduction, the Falstaffian rumbustiousness of the Allegro vivace, and the sheer infectious grace of a second subject that, astonishingly for Bruckner, has a kind of quicksilver charm that even Rossini might have envied.
Inbal, like Haitink, is more gracious than Chailly in the slow movement. Chailly rather overplays his hand by making the opening seem unduly portentous. But Inbal's wind players sound coarser than their Berlin rivals. And, in any case, the Teldec recording is rather dry, with, generally, distant wind detailing that rather mutes the comic and dramatic impact of some of the score's best moments. The Decca recording, by contrast, is full-bodied and splendidly explicit, particularly where the brass and woodwinds are concerned. Throw in the fact that Chailly adds a fill-up in the form of the early G minor Overture, and the case for the Decca record is overwhelming.'