Claudio Abbado’s international career was launched with Schubert, when he won the Koussevitsky conducting competition in 1958 with a performance of the Unfinished Symphony, and the composer remained an important part of Abbado’s repertoire until his death. His performances of the complete symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe have been among the finest on disc since they were recorded for Deutsche Grammophon a quarter of a century ago. Abbado was also one of the few leading conductors to champion (and record) Schubert’s opera Fierrabras, and the Unfinished Symphony also began the programme of the final concerts he conducted in Lucerne in 2013.

Two years earlier he’d performed the Ninth Symphony, “the Great” C major, in concerts in Bologna and Bolzano, with the Orchestra Mozart, the chamber orchestra he founded in 2004. This disc has been assembled from those 2011 performances; his view of the work seems to have changed little over almost 25 years. As before, Abbado observes every repeat in the score, so that the symphony lasts over 60 minutes. The first and third movements take a little longer this time, the finale is a bit faster, and despite Abbado’s choice of a chamber orchestra for such a massive work, nothing ever seems underpowered.

This is unmistakably a performance that balances Schubert’s last completed symphony right on the cusp of Romanticism. So much of the detail and the way Abbado shapes it here looks further into the 19th century and towards Bruckner, especially. The eloquent phrasing of the lower strings’ counter-melody in the opening pages of the first movement makes that historical point effortlessly, and though Abbado brings a rusticity to the scherzo and trio, and irresistible energy to the finale, what his performance conveys most powerfully is the sense of a symphony bursting at its classical seams and pushing its expressive language as far as it will go.