This is a superb account of the original 1874 version of Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, first published in 1975 in Leopold Nowak’s Bruckner Society edition. Interestingly, it will be the only version of the Fourth that François-Xavier Roth will be including in the cycle of Bruckner symphonies he’s making ahead of the 2024 Bruckner bicentenary.

For many years, Eliahu Inbal’s 1982 Frankfurt recording (Teldec, 6/84 – available now only as part of a 10-CD budget-price set from Warner Classics) was the performance to have, though Roger Norrington’s rather more driven 2007 Stuttgart account (Hänssler, 1/09) would later join the shortlist.

The Roth has the best of both worlds. Like Inbal, his tempos are more moderate than Norrington’s; yet, as always with this most grounded yet theatrically minded of contemporary conductors, there’s a sense of the reading being alive from first note to last, even when – as occasionally happens in the two outer movements – Bruckner’s map-reading goes slightly awry.

Reviewing Roth’s recording of the Seventh Symphony (5/22), Christian Hoskins wrote of some unusually swift tempos, while noting that ‘the performance never sounds fast’. It’s the same here, albeit in reverse: a performance that allows the symphony space in which to make its case but which never sounds slow. The natural, unforced tread of the first movement’s second subject is a particular delight, as is Roth’s pleasingly easeful way with the slow movement and the late climax to which it naturally builds.

If the finale’s rustic G major dance subject (fig C, 3'09") sounds rushed, both here and in the two rival recordings, it’s Bruckner’s fault for giving the theme to a pair of flutes (plus an oboe in the recapitulation), with the violins cavorting beneath. In the 1880 version he etches out the theme on flute, oboe and clarinet and banishes entirely the violins.

So yes, there’s the odd lapse in the scoring of the 1874 version; and no, we don’t have the famous 1878 ‘hunting’ Scherzo that replaced the woodnotes wild of this 1874 original. Robert Simpson described the 1874 Scherzo as ‘shambling’, ‘perhaps the worst composition of Bruckner’s maturity’, which suggests that he probably never heard it, certainly not in a performance as fine as this.

The movement was dropped, I suspect, because of the difficulties it posed to orchestras. With their meticulous preparation and superb echt-German horn section, Roth’s Gürzenich Orchestra don’t make light of the difficulties; they simply give us a vibrant and atmospheric rendering of some really rather good music.

If Bruckner had not revised the Fourth Symphony, it would still have won a favoured place in the canon, albeit without undermining the chronology of the journey that takes us through the Fifth and Sixth symphonies to the glorious Seventh, which Bruckner began the moment the revised version of the Fourth was finally put to bed. When complete, the Roth cycle will reassert that initial chronology. Meanwhile, it provides us with the best-realised, and best-recorded, account of the original version of the Fourth we have yet had.