Known as the Wagner Symphony, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3 includes numerous quotations from Wagner’s operas and is a fitting tribute from Bruckner to his idol. For some years, this has been notorious as the most re-worked – by the composer himself, his collaborators and later editors – of all his symphonies. This recording presents the second (1876-77) and third versions (1888/89), in the Critical Edition by Leopold Nowak. A longer, intermediate version of the second movement, played during a rehearsal in camera by the Vienna Philharmonic (27 September 1877) but already cut by the composer before the first performance of the second version conducted by Bruckner himself (16 December 1877), has been published separately in the Bruckner Complete Edition as Adagio 1876. It is included here at the end of the 1877 version (CD 1, Track 5), so that it can easily be programmed as an alternative to Track 2. Bruckner’s original 1873 version of the Symphony (edited by Novak) is available on Naxos 8.553454.