Even putting aside recordings by conductors like Knappertsbusch and Matacic (Denon) who have used cut and altered texts, Bruckner's Fifth Symphony has rarely been satisfactorily presented on record. Time and again conductors seem to misjudge tempos or the relations between them, particularly in the finale which is often given a kind of spurious theatricality by the use of accelerating tempos for the fugue's various appearances. Klemperer and Barenboim, in their deleted EMI and DG versions, were guilty of this. Inbal's new account of the finale is exciting, but brash at times and not entirely coherent. In the slow movement, whose gait and complex pulses often defeat interpreters, he is reasonably consistent (unlike Solti on Decca—nla—who began and ended in quite different tempos) but he joins a small group of conductors who choose to take the movement at a swift walking pace. Bruckner's markings are sehr langsam and alla breve but Inbal's tempo, which is quicker even than those attempted on other earlier deleted recordings by Maazel and Ormandy seems insensitively quick.
In general, this is not one of the more sensitively played of Inbal's Frankfurt Bruckner cycle, though the recording, for all its immediacy, gives a reasonably spacious view of the orchestra. Haitink's deleted Philips recording with the Concertgebouw Orchestra always struck me as offering an outstandingly lucid account of the symphony for those allergic to the majestic reach of Karajan's Berlin version on DG, a version which continues to dominate the field on CD. Either is preferable as a reading to Inbal's and the Karajan is an attractive buy, with a fine account of the 1866 Linz edition of the First Symphony completing the two-disc CD set, where Inbal merely offers yet another of those spurious attempts to reconstitute the finale of the Ninth.
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