What is at stake in Bruckner’s unfinished Ninth Symphony, writes Volker Hagedorn in an excellent booklet essay, is nothing less than life itself. Some Brucknerians might go further, echoing Bill Shankly’s dictum, ‘there are those who think football’s a matter of life and death. I can assure them it’s much more serious than that.’

An equivalent view of the Ninth Symphony appears to have been shared by conductors such as Siegmund von Hausegger, Volkmar Andreae – the swiftest and most volatile of all (Music & Arts, 10/04) – and Jascha Horenstein in the decades immediately following the publication of Bruckner’s original score in 1932. They were troubled times, of course, unlike later years when styles in Bruckner conducting changed and performances of the Ninth began to put on weight.

My initial impression was that François-Xavier Roth’s new Cologne recording might be a reversion to that earlier approach, not least in the concluding Adagio, which can sound as well over the 21 minute span of Horenstein’s celebrated 1953 Vienna recording as it does over the 30 minutes of latter-day performances under Celibidache and Giulini.

Sadly, this is not the case. Roth is a fine conductor but, unlike Horenstein, Andreae and others, he’s not a natural Brucknerian, as this brusque, noisy and not especially well-executed performance tends to confirm. That’s implicit, I guess, in his decision to record a cycle that uses original versions wherever possible. The orchestrations were a touch cruder in those earlier drafts. And there’s far less competition from rival recordings – until one reaches the Ninth where, as with three of the previous four symphonies, there is no earlier version.

Roth seems most at home playing the second movement as an essay in mechanised violence. And he catches powerfully the terror of the passage leading towards that notorious triple forte discord near the Adagio’s end. Yet the end itself is drily done. As Bruckner’s Samson-like journey draws to a close, there’s no sense of ‘calm of mind, all passion spent’.

It’s the seething volcano of the first movement, however, which reveals most clearly the reading’s shortcomings. The finest performances meld the music’s competing lyric and dramatic elements into an organically evolving whole, something Roth’s stop-go handling of rhythm and theme makes well-nigh impossible.

The Myrios recording has worryingly recessed flutes and oboes, though it’s eccentric or ill-thought-out orchestral balances that are the principal problem. Recording engineers can only work with what they’re given.

As for the Ninth on record, I’ve travelled from the 1953 Horenstein, via a superb 1979 Günter Wand account, also made in Cologne, and back and forth through a dozen memorable readings before arriving at Claudio Abbado’s great valedictory performance in Lucerne in 2013 – Bruckner’s farewell to music, and Abbado’s.