This hour-long Bruckner Nine (in its three-movement unfinished state) was recorded around the time that these artists played the work at last year’s Enescu Festival (as below), but which side of it I cannot say (the booklet isn’t date-specific beyond September 2023 on home ground). Anyway, Paavo Järvi and his splendid orchestra, captured in first-class sound, plot a course through the work that is direct yet with a flexibility that has a thought-through logic to it, whether impetuous or reflecting, Järvi alive to the music’s adventuring. The first movement – vivid and glowing, lyrically intense, contrapuntal layers clarified (violins are antiphonal), climaxes made inevitable – is followed by a measured and rhythmically vital Scherzo, embracing a Trio scampering and yielding, with woodwinds highlighted and quiet timpani notes always audible. The slow movement, if not Bruckner’s intention as the Symphony’s ‘last word’, has about it a certain resignation as well as a positive (bass) tread, a dichotomy that heightens the climax’s discord, and the ambiguous coda. Alpha Classics 1068 is released on September 6.