Günter Wand and Sir Reginald Goodall were distinguished musicians who were marginalised by the larger international community for the greater part of their careers. Wand was a capable symphonic conductor of the German school who became something of a Bruckner specialist; Goodall was a revered Wagnerian who made occasional forays into late Bruckner. These two recordings of the Ninth Symphony are live. Both are immensely compelling. Neither remotely resembles the other.

The Eighth Symphony was Wand’s principal calling-card beyond the bounds of Cologne and Hamburg; yet, as this powerful performance confirms, his reading of the Ninth has an even greater claim on our attention. Of all the versions made since Siegmund von Hausegger’s pioneering 1938 HMV recording of the new critical edition, Wand’s 1979 Cologne account was in some ways the most riveting. No rival version exposed the ageing Bruckner’s lacerated psyche quite so lucidly or fearlessly. As Wand’s reputation grew, so his recordings of the Ninth proliferated: Lübeck Cathedral (1988), Hamburg (1993), Berlin (1998). All were live performances, all slower than the Cologne studio version. None worked quite as well, though the accuracy, eloquence and visceral intensity of the playing on the Berlin Philharmonic version (made when Wand was in his 87th year) has guaranteed it a place in the Pantheon.

And now this: archive gold from the summer of 1979, a live performance recorded in the basilica of the Benedictine monastery of Ottobeuren in Bavaria just two weeks after the Cologne studio recording. The reading is the same, the orchestra different. (Player for player, the Stuttgart RSO is marginally better, though – live and unedited – there are few minor blemishes in the Adagio.)

The recording is astonishing. The basilica has a reverberation period double that of a standard concert hall. The South German Radio engineer incorporates this into the sound-picture yet produces a three-dimensional image that is focused, clean and clear. Compare the end of this first movement with that of the 1998 Berlin recording and there can be no doubting the greater force and clarity of the younger conductor and the more venerable acoustic. The 1979 studio recording was briefly available as a single CD, since when it has been available only as part of Wand’s complete Cologne cycle. This memorable archive release solves that problem at a stroke.

Goodall’s Ninth emerges out of the mists, not of time but of tape hiss. Though this was a BBC studio recording, the source, curiously, is a private tape. (Did the Corporation wipe the original?) The ear adjusts, of course; after a few moments, the mist effectively vanishes. The recording appears congested at first but is, in fact, splendidly explicit. Like all the old master conductors, Goodall made his own balances. We hear what he wants us to hear, which in this instance is a rich palette of sound from which absorbing detail emerges in the course of the painting of the larger picture.

Goodall conducts the symphony as he conducted complete Wagner operas: slowly, painstakingly, with long lines, great eloquence and a sense of where the important staging-posts in the drama really lie. There are only three other conductors on record who have taken the symphony quite as slowly as this: Giulini with the VPO (glorious), Celibidache (striking, though less well played than the Giulini or, indeed, the BBC SO/Goodall), and Jeffrey Tate, whose deleted 1991 EMI performance was an architectural wreck. On technical grounds alone, the Goodall is unlikely to be a first choice, even for a long-breathed Ninth. It is, nonetheless, an absorbing document which bona fide Brucknerians and collectors of Goodall’s Wagner recordings are bound to thrill to.