In his successive revisions to this, his textually most vexatious symphony, Bruckner bends the first movement towards a symphonic allegro and away from the generous discursions of the original signposted by the capacious expressive marking of Moderate, more movement, misterioso. Jaap van Zweden sets a steady tempo and gives additional space to the big restatements of the D minor motto-theme; but having chosen the 1877 revision over the 1873 original, he offers a reading that falls awkwardly between the different characters of the two – as, more commonly proposed nowadays, does the 1877 version itself fall between the original and the gingered-up 1889 edition. But Bernard Haitink has always been a master of the 1877 and his recordings secure more focused and more rhythmically exact playing from two great Bruckner orchestras within less boomy acoustics than the Hilversum radio studio used here.

The bass-rich portamento and dragging rubato with which van Zweden lends elegiac weight to the first and third themes of the slow movement suggest a supercharged Beethovenian approach which is perhaps less relevant to Bruckner’s early symphonies than the post-Schubertian, lyric transparency of line which Haitink keeps to the fore. That’s not to say that the wind parts are occluded; but transitions and excisions (such as at fig I of the Adagio, 10'00" here) hang in the air while Haitink fosters a more mobile dialectic that makes evolutionary sense of what are often, whether by accident or design, abrupt shifts in argument that Wagner himself would surely have scorned. Van Zweden (and Haitink’s Vienna recording) uses the coda to the Scherzo which first appeared in Nowak’s 1981 edition, though I think the warning ‘not to be printed’ should be borne in mind, by performers if not by scholars. In sum, this is a resplendent addition to an important cycle in the making but it’s far from the whole story where the Third itself is concerned.