I came to Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s Bruckner Third with his bravura Schumann symphony cycle singing and dancing inside my head still, not as a direct point of comparison but as a barometer reading of his interpretative powers. I had also enjoyed the dramatic smack of his recent Bruckner Fourth; but this Third Symphony feels too much like Nézet-Séguin is letting the sand flow through his fingers as he tests the structural grain. He opts for Bruckner’s original 1873 version, which is the longest stretch of music Bruckner would assemble, and you realise how finely nuanced the distinction can be between scale and proportion. Bookended by Bruckner’s labyrinthine and objectified slow movement and finale, the minuscule and homespun Scherzo has a tendency to leave our symphonic expectations short-changed by unbalancing the overall form. And I’m not convinced that Nézet-Séguin solves this fundamental formal dilemma.

Or perhaps he tries too hard. There is much to enjoy about the opening movement. The internal balance of the Orchestre Métropolitain strings, as those obsessive imitative quavers loop the loop, blends like porous clay, momentum accruing that flings Nézet-Séguin towards the first climactic tutti fanfare. Expedient dynamic control comes as standard: true piano leans towards truer pianissimo in the answering string phrase; and, when the opening material reappears, the structure, you think, locks into place.

The finale, too, achieves a flying start, but in both cases, just as Nézet-Séguin hits cruising altitude, structural turbulence makes you wish he’d kept his seatbelt on. Georg Tintner with the RSNO excels at expressing the finale’s internal contradiction: a movement that proudly displays the time-bomb seeds of its own structural fragmentation as it hurtles forwards. But as Bruckner collapses the structure, Nézet-Séguin’s flow becomes awkwardly lumpen as he tries with grim determination to shape the material. Peter Quantrill, in his review of Nézet-Séguin’s Bruckner Eighth (5/10), likened progress to being walked around a Stations of the Cross inside a cathedral of sound; but now your ears stumble over untidy blocks of falling masonry. The slow movement is rudderless and the Scherzo feels oddly untailored. A problematic view of what, admittedly, could be Bruckner’s most problematic score.