Why has Bruckner's Sixth Symphony remained relatively unfamiliar compared to his other mature masterworks? After all, it features thrilling orchestral effects, is decked out with profuse variety, and includes one of the composer's most grippingly beautiful slow movements. Bruckner also found it to be one of his boldest statements; in this account (Nowak Edition), Riccardo Chailly presses down against the veins of tension coursing through the symphony to create a largely exciting, charged momentum, particularly effective in the symphony's rhythmically overdetermined climaxes. He seems less interested in pursuing Brucknerian repose and serenity than Georg Tintner (who has recorded a splendid Sixth in his budget series on Naxos) and never achieves the sustained level of organic inevitability that still makes Klemperer's classic account the touchstone interpretation. Still, there's plenty of poetry in his voicing of Bruckner's unusually lush garlands of melody in the Adagio and a driving pulse that's hair-raising in the especially scary Scherzo. Chailly gets a fine performance from the Concertgebouw, above all in the unstoppered brilliance of the horns and trumpets (listen to their antiphony in the long first-movement coda for an especially magical effect). The coupling with four orchestrated Goethe songs by Hugo Wolf--one of the happy few to understand Bruckner in his time--shows off Matthias Goerne's ravishing, always-expressive tone, and makes a choice lagniappe.