Marek Janowski’s choice of the ‘final’ 1877 edition – in a version by William Carragan which goes further than Leopold Nowak did in removing the palimpsest of earlier material created by Robert Haas that was known and loved by earlier listeners – might at first appear to account for the abrupt jump-cuts of the finale; but so violent is the current action on the battleground of Brucknerian interpretation that we already have two hugely contrasting views of this finale, from Barenboim and Venzago, by the side of which Janowski sounds matter-of-fact. One need not pine for Barenboim’s old-school romanticism or Venzago’s neurasthenic unpredictability to wonder what happened to those pauses in the first movement that used to give the symphony its trivial little nickname but also worked with the fanfare theme to create restless tension over longer spans such as had barely been conceived in symphonic music until that point.

The bubbling clarinets and well-pointed bass ostinato of the SRO as they elaborate the slow movement’s solemn second theme are all very well until you turn to Dausgaard or Karajan, who, in their very different ways, uncover a much larger and deeper expressive world beneath the notes, one of genuinely Schubertian pathos that cannot simply be accessed by the ‘right’ tempo for a symphony that in many ways sounds older than its date of 1873. A slower basic tempo helps but Sir Georg Solti showed in a 1991 concert with the Stuttgart RSO (periodically available on DVD, now on YouTube) that the dynamism and exhilaration he brings to the outer movements at speeds very similar to the extremes taken by Janowski need not preclude the grip and feeling for which I listen in vain here. To complain about Pentatone’s recorded sound would appear churlish, when one can hear everything, but sometimes clarity of utterance can obscure the absence of having anything much to say; not a charge I’d ever level at Dausgaard.