Anyone fortunate enough to have been in Symphony Hall on October 22, 1999, will likely testify to having heard a sublime performance of Anton Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony by Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic — one on a par with Abbado’s legendary 1979 BSO performance of Gustav Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony, or the Mahler Ninth that he and the Berliners did here in 1993. We’re not getting Abbado’s Berlin Bruckner Ninth on CD, but Deutsche Grammophon has released a live recording of a performance he gave with the Vienna Philharmonic back in 1996. It’s an opportunity to compare not just the Berlin Phil with the Vienna, but Abbado with Pierre Boulez, who conducted the Ninth with the Vienna Phil this past March in Carnegie Hall.

I wish I could report that this new CD is every bit as transporting as the Symphony Hall experience (at the time I was ready to trade all 40 of my recorded Bruckner Ninths for Abbado’s performance). One obvious missing element is the extraordinary fullness of the live Berlin (or Vienna, as Boulez demonstrated in New York) sound. Bruckner, with his cathedral ambiance, doesn’t record as well as, say, Mahler; the harmonic argument — which in Bruckner is the argument — gets prorogued by the recording-studio ceiling when it should be floating up to the vault, if not the heavens. And the big climaxes here don’t register the way they did in Symphony Hall.

But Abbado also sounds as if he hadn’t fully digested Bruckner’s organ-stop building-block composing technique: he still makes the occasional smooth transition (which with normal composers is the right thing to do, but Bruckner isn’t normal) when a decisive shift was called for. The slow pizzicato section that begins at 3:02 of the first movement just slides into the A-major second subject; that section doesn’t provide sanctuary from the hellish octave drops of the opening, and the third subject, back in the original D minor, doesn’t rock insidiously. There’s little contrast in the counterstatement until the run-up to the first distress call, at 14:09; the ritard that begins at 17:40 leaves the reappearance of the second subject with no effective tempo. Abbado moves matter-of-factly away from the discordant climax. And the coda, where the trumpets attempt to lift the orchestra into E-flat before getting dragged back down into D, has heroics but not hysteria.

Nitpicking aside, the climax’s panic-attack ostinato in the oboes, horns, and violas is audible (it often isn’t), and in the coda Abbado inserts an exquisite luftpause just before the unison crash back to D. (When he did it at Symphony Hall, I got goosebumps.) The Scherzo, moreover, is hard to fault: jackhammer hard and in your face, poised between apprehension and paranoia. Likewise the pilgrim Adagio, a movement in search of religious faith, hovers between despair and hope — listen to the obsessive car-alarm beeping of the oboes and clarinets at 17:30, before the A-flat second subject resurfaces to comfort them.

Still, at 27:22 to Abbado’s 25:13, the Adagio of Riccardo Chailly’s 1997 recording with the Concertgebouw (Decca) has more appalling nightmares and more ecstatic consolations (Abbado hardly notices the last traumatic outburst, at 22:35). The Trio of Chailly’s Scherzo is almost Socratic (as opposed to the usual slimy); his opening movement is much like Abbado’s, a little plusher in sound and with the odd brass detail. His interpretation is the more extroverted of the two, but I wonder whether Abbado may not hold up better to repeated listenings. I also wonder whether the performance Abbado gave that magical evening in Symphony Hall, with three additional years of thought behind it, really wasn’t an improvement on this one. It would be great if Deutsche Grammophon saw fit to release a Vienna Philharmonic performance with Boulez; meanwhile, the eschatological visions of Wilhelm Furtwängler (Music & Arts, 1944) and Otto Klemperer (EMI, 1970) can be had at bargain prices, and the otherwise undistinguished performance by Yoav Talmi and the Oslo Philharmonic (Chandos, two discs for the price of one) includes William Carragan’s stunning completion, from Bruckner’s sketches, of this unfinished report from the Apocalypse.