Album: Simon Rattle, Berliner Philharmoniker Bruckner 9 – Four Movement Version (EMI Classics)

Few composers thought bigger, or longer, than Bruckner, who constantly revised his colossal works – in the case of this final symphony, spending nine years writing and still not completing it before his death, leading to a plethora of posthumous fourth movement “completions” over the past three decades.

Simon Rattle has used the most recent of these, the Samale/Mazzuca/Phillips/ Cohrs version, for this four-movement recording, and while there is undeniable logicality in the endless climbing repetitions and the echoes of the vaunting Wagnerian touches from the first movement, the added movement does tend to detract from the particularly fine treatment of the third movement Adagio.

Download: Symphony No 9