These releases of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony offer a fascinating contrast, BIS’s recording giving us the well-known second version of the score as opposed to the third and final version offered by Capriccio, the form in which the symphony was known to audiences and musicians alike for nearly 50 years but which is now infrequently heard.

The BIS release might feature the more familiar 1878/80 version of the score but there’s nothing routine about the performance. As in his recent recording of the Third (A/21), Dausgaard tends to anticipate the arrival of louder passages by increasing speeds, an approach also favoured by conductors such as Jochum and Venzago. However, the pacing this time manages to avoid sounding breathless, as it occasionally did in the Third Symphony, and the result is powerful and involving. The Andante enjoys a compelling and atmospheric reading, helped by some impressively full-bodied string-playing, and the Scherzo is enormously energetic and involving. I especially appreciate the fact that the triplets played by the horns during the last six bars of the movement are clearly audible as opposed to being lost in a wash of sound as they are in most recordings. Dausgaard’s interpretation of the finale is particularly bold and dramatic, and features a very impressive build-up to the final peroration. Some listeners may find the overall approach unremittingly forceful but the result is a valuable alternative to the grander and more lyrical interpretations available by conductors such as Böhm, Wand and Thielemann, and the recording has remarkable clarity and heft.

Having already recorded the two earlier versions of the Fourth Symphony, Markus Poschner now reaches the 1888 version in his cycle. This version largely disappeared from view following the publication of the 1878/80 version by Robert Haas in the 1930s, being widely regarded as a well-meaning but misguided attempt to improve Bruckner’s work by his pupils and supporters Ferdinand Löwe and Franz Schalk. However, the subsequent emergence of the original manuscript score from private ownership revealed that although some of the ideas may have come from elsewhere, the score was actually the result of a detailed overhaul by Bruckner himself. It was determined to be authentic by Alfred Orel in the 1940s and Haas announced his intention to publish it as part of the Bruckner critical edition. It wasn’t until the appearance of Benjamin M Korstvedt’s edition in 2004, however, that the 1888 version was finally validated and made formally available.

Compared to the 1878/80 version, the 1888 score features some structural alterations in the third and fourth movements, changes to the orchestration of all four movements and the inclusion of numerous performance markings. Poschner leads an astutely paced and well-played reading of the symphony but one that’s somewhat lacking in power and depth, a factor that also affects the attractiveness of recordings of the 1888 version by Osmo Vänskä (BIS, 10/10) and Jakub Hrůša (Accentus). For anyone wishing to hear a distinctive recording of the 1888 version, however, Wilhelm Furtwängler’s live 1951 account from Stuttgart, most recently available in a DG box-set (12/19), is hard to beat. Long criticised as being a recording of a discredited text, it turns out that the conductor was performing an authentic Bruckner score after all.