Ivor Bolton makes a convincingly grand case for Bruckner’s First as a work of innovative maturity, with no less experience behind its formal novelties than Brahms’s own first remaining essay in the genre. The opening movement’s steady opening tread has a weight and purpose that almost carries through to the culminating power of its Tannhäuser theme (at 3'25", given full value by the Mozarteum brass), only slightly arrested by the kind of rhetorically square and unmarked intake of breath that also spoils the movement’s dash to the line.

In like manner, a solidly implacable pulse dominates the Scherzo, notwithstanding textural insertions such as string accents also to be heard on Abbado’s various recordings. (This one, incidentally, is no less wrongly labelled than most of its rivals. It represents the 1877 revision of the 1865/66 original, which is still only available in versions conducted by Georg Tintner and Gerd Schaller). The pay-off comes in a spacious and unusually cogent balancing of the finale’s contrasting episodes, launched by the trombones with a force worthy of the equivalent moment in Beethoven’s C minor symphony.

In size (small), tonal balance (brassy), vibrato (lean) and matters of articulation, the Mozarteum orchestra is closer to Mario Venzago’s Tapiola Sinfonietta than Karajan’s Berlin Phil; Bolton’s direction of them, the reverse. This makes for an impressively elegiac Adagio, at once austere in phrasing and undernourished in sound. In that sense it reflects the contradictions with which the composer himself was sufficiently uncomfortable to produce the 1891 ‘Vienna’ revision when he should have been getting on with the Ninth.