Recorded In The Churck of St. Alban, Holburn, London – March 29, 30 – April 1, 1985
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
I bet very few (if any) Classical Music bloggers are reviewing this piece – I don’t know why – it’s awesome if you’re pulling an all nighter and the sun is about to rise! (Sorry, not actually one sentence – but I used dashes to make it look like it.)
Anton Bruckner
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ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Robert Simpson
BRUCKNER – MASS IN E MINOR // LIBERA ME // ZWEI ACQUALE
Bruckner’s three mature masses, in D minor, E minor, and F minor,were written between 1864 and 1868, after his seven year period of grinding study with Simon Sechter, during which he composed very little. When he eventually plunged into composition again (he was no in his forties), he had consolidated his skills, and the D minorand F minor masses show a maturity based on the Austrian classical tradition.
The E minorstands apart; it uses a windband instead of the classical orchestra, and it is clearly influeneced by a study of early counterpoint, especially Palestrina’s. Of the three masses it is the ‘purest.’ It also looks to both past and future in a way the others do not.
At this time of his career Bruckner’s sense of movement in his large-scale music reflected the classical era; the masses in D minor and F minor (as well as a less characteristic earlier one in B flat) are modelled on the symphonic masses of Haydn and Mozart, with Beethoven and Schubert looking on.
Anton Bruckner – Statue – Vienna, Austria
Bruckner had not yet explored the vast, slow time-scale of his later symphonies. He had begun to discover Wagner, who found a way to create musical processes slow enough to accomodate stage drama, and he was to become the first and greatest composer to apply such a time-scale to purely instrumental music (this is the only respect in which Bruckner is a ‘Wagnerian’ compsoer).
But in their sense of movement the works of the eighteen-sexities, two symphonies (No. ‘0’ and No. 1)and the three great masses, do no more than hint at a new road, though they all have potent individuality.
The E minor mass of 1866 was revised in 1882, the version recorded here. Bruckner’s lifelong addiction to revision under pressure from his well-meaning but mistaken Wagnerian friends is one of the sadder stories of music, but the masses did not suffer seriously from it; although there are unauthentic scores, Bruckner’s own revisions are plainly advantageous.
Anton Bruckner
The E minor massreceived improvements that cannot be compared with the disastrous meddling inflicted by the distracted composer on its contemporary the First Symphony in 1890-91.
In his symphonies Bruckner had entered a world few people (and sometimes not even his own great mind housed in a naive personality) fully understood, while the masses could be related to familiar norms.
The revisions of detail in the E minor massdo not alter its nature, its fine balance between forward and backward views. Its concern with slow floating counterpoint, while it refers to Palestrina, yet anticipates the deliberation of to its companions in D minor and F minor, admirable though they are.
This can be felt at once in the opening Kyrie, largely unaccompanies except for the intermittent use of horns and trombones. Long suspensions and clear harmony create a sense of space. In the central section (Christe eleison) there is more movement, and a climax, then the Kyriereturns, this time to make its own climax before fading into vaulted heights.
The Gloriaand Credo, on the other hand, are essentially classical allegros with the contrasts of tempo and style dictated by the text. For the most part, Bruckner is revelling in the athletic energy familiar to his great predecessors Haydn and Beethoven, but with textures simpler and more spare anbd rhythms blunter and more naive.
Matthew Best
Both movements are in C major and contain central contrasts, the Gloriahaving a quiet secion on ‘Qui tollis peccata mundi’ with typical horn phrases, and the Credoa simple but profound treatment of ‘Et incaratus est’and ‘Crucifixus,’a stream of perfectly formed, dignified melody of great beauty.
The Gloriaends with a short but trenchant chromatic fugato on ‘Amen,’and the Credo(whose main theme anticipates strikingly the sturdy power of the scherzo of the Eighth Symphonyof more than twenty years later) reaches its apex in a broad and mighty cadence.
It is the Sanctusthat Palestrina’s influence (in the form of a quotation from the Missa brevis of 1570) is clearest. A two-part canon is enveloped in eight-party counterpoint as a great crescendo is built. The whole movement lasts only a few minutes but has a power of suggestion out of all proportion to its dimensions; such a slow crescendo as this beings some of Bruckner’s greatest symphonic movements, and the tribue to Palestrina is also a glance to the future, not only Bruckner’s own, but to such things as the magnificent opening pages of Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony.
The gentle and subtle Benedictusis in full sonata form, its development deeply modulated and its coda a bright burst on ‘Hosanna in excelsis.’The final Agnus Deidelivers the customary threefold prayer, each time as a crescendo, the last quietened to make way for teh hushed ‘Dona nobis pacem,’ perhaps the most beautiful music in the whole work, which is without doubt the deepest and most concentrated of Bruckner’s masses.
LIBERA ME
The fine motet, Libera me, for choir with three trombones, was written in 1854. Although this was before his lon gperiod of study with Sechter, Bruckner was no beginner; he was thirty, with plenty of experience of church music behind him, and the story that he did not become a proper composer until he was forty is a myth.
As early as 1849 he had produced a beutiful and individual little Requiemthat ought to be better know than it is, and his talents had already been recognized in his own environment.
This Libera me is simple and clear; it contains no elaborate counterpoint, but its part-writing is excellent, as is the calculation of sonorities. It has the solemn dignity befitting a funeral piece, and its middle section expresses the fear of judgment with considerable power and economy.
ROBERT SIMPSON
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English Chamber Orchestra
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Mass in E Minor, etc.
Aequalis No. 1 [1:50]
Libera me [9:04]
Aequalis No. 2 [1:55]
Mass in E Minor
4. Kyrie [7:45]
5. Gloria [6:32]
6. Credo [10:34]
7. Sanctus [3:32]
8. Benedictus [6:27]
9. Agnus Dei [5:45]
FINAL THOUGHT:
This piece holds a special place in my heart. It’s from the 1980s and I was staying up late trying to finish a writing piece and this one popped through my 5 CD CHANGER and hit right around sunrise as I was completing my piece. The timing was perfect and I’ll never hate this disc (or really criticize it).
You gotta love Bruno Walter: “Brass, play as loud as you can – and THEN PLAY LOUDER!” – love it!
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Uwe Kraemer
BRUCKNER – SYMPHONY NO. 9 IN D MINOR
Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) considered himself Beethoven’s successor in the realm of the symphony, and there are those who feel that he was justified.
These protagonists of Bruckner’s music point out his expansion of the symphonic form, his intensification of a poetic idea, and the grandeur and nobility of his musical speech. But there are others – and they are equally articulate – who feel that Bruckner’s gradeur is only bombast, his poetry only overwritten prose, his expansive style and form only so much pomposity.
Anton Bruckner
And so, the battle over Bruckner has been waged for many years – and for that matter is being waged – making him one of the most provocative figures in music.
Born in a the small Austrian town of Ansfelden, Bruckner spent most of his life in his native country. For a while he taught music at the St. Florian secular music school, which he had formerly attended as a pupil; it was in this post that, in 1849, he wrote his first talented work, a Requiem.
In 1853, he settled in Vienna, with whose musical life he was henceforth to be intimately associated. For a while he served as a choral director; then, in 1868, he was appointed Professor at the Vienna Conservatory, filling this position with great honor for many years.
Meanwhile, he heard Wagner’s Tannhauser, an experience that overwhelmed him and henceforth made him a passionate disciple of the master. Wagnerian influences are frequently in evidence in his music, while his Third Symphony is openly dedicated to Wagner.
The controversy over Bruckner’s music began early – indeed, with the very first performances of his first symphonies. One of the officials at the Conservatory, studying his early manuscripts, advised him to throw his symphonies in a trash basket. The first performance of the Third Symphony was an outright fiasco. The critics were savage in their denunciation; and famous musicians, among them Brahms, were undisguisedly hostile to him.
Toward the close of his life, Bruckner found a certain measure of recognition and appreciation. Performances of his later symphonies by Nikisch, Hans Richter, Mottl, Hermann Levi, and Karl Muck were comparatively successful.
In 1891 Bruckner received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Vienna and a few years later the Empereor presented him with a stipend and a decoration. His seventieth birthday was the occasion for a nationwide celebration. However – despite the increasing favor – Bruckner still had his hostile critics. And, after his death in 1896, his symphonies still continued to arouse controversy outside of Austria.
Of all his symphonies, Bruckner’s Ninth suffered most, perhaps from editing. Bruckner died without completing it, and Ferdinand Loewe had a free hand in revision. He went at it with a will, and it was not until 1934 and the publication of the original manuscript that the real stature of this symphony, Bruckner’s last will and testament, was revealed.
The composer had struggled with his gigantic Eighth Symphony for six years and had begun the Ninthwhile the Eighthas being revised, working on it from September 21, 1887, until the day of his death, October 11, 1896.
Brucknerites tend to rejoince that the Ninthwas never finished, contending that the great Adagiois a farewell to life and that anything following it would be anticlimactic. Nonethless, Bruckner wrestled with a finale for two years and finished the greater part of it in full score.
But he was haunted by the fear that he would not have time to complete the symphony. The physician who attended him in his final illness (in the luxury of the Belvedere Palace, where the Emperor had belatedly granted him an apartment) once discovered him on his knees praying ‘Dear God, let me get well soon. You see, I need my health to finish the Ninth.’
The Symphony is indeed dedicated to ‘Dear God’ (‘Dem lieben Gott’).
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 9 in D Minor
Feierlich (misterioso) [23:53]
Scherzo (bewegt lebhaft) [ 11:32]
Sehr langsam (feierlich) [23:17]
FINAL THOUGHT:
I don’t want to say it’s the definiitive performance – but damn – it’s pretty close. Bruckner seemed to hate strings and love brass – and Bruno Walter is a brother in arms. Considering so many people hated the symphony (and Bruckner) – I must disagree. I think this is awesome.
Boom! A great recording from the Soviet era, this one tees up Mahler nicely
Anton Bruckner – Statue – Vienna, Austria
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Soviet Archivist (translated by Someone Who Didn’t Know Russian Very Well)
BRUCKNER – SYMPHONY NO. 9 IN D MINOR
Born in St. Petersburg on June 4, 1903 and died in Leningrad on January 20, 1988, Yevgeny Mravinsky is one of the greatst musicians Russia has produced in the last century.
Yevgeny Mravinsky
He completed his training at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire. His teachers were Sherbachov, Gauk and Malko until 1931. At the same time, Mravinsky occupied the post of pianist at the ballet school in his home city.
After being appointed conductor at the Kirov Theatre Orchestra, the Russian artist, as a prize in the national competition, was awarded the post of principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra in 1938.
Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra
Thanks to the hard work and the artistry of Mravinsky, the Symphony Group become one of the best in the world.
His love for the music of his contemporary colleagues prompted him to concentrate his repertoire on composers such as Tchaikovsky and, in particular, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich, many of whose works Mravinsky premiered.
Yevgeny Mravinsky
This recording gives us the opportunity to listen to Mravsinky interpreting the music of a composer not considered to be one of his specialties: Anton Bruckner.
The composer began writing the first outlines of his Symphony No. 9 in 1887. His death occurred in the October 1896, leaving behind an unfinished work of three magnificent movements.
Bruckner first encountered the music of Wagner in 1863, the year in which he composed his first and unnumbered symphony. Thereafter, days on end of working obsessively, as well as romantic and professional misfortune, led to a deterioration in his health almost to the point of losing his sanity.
All of this suffering is heard in the magnificent music of the Ninth Symphony.
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 9 in D Minor
Feierlich (misterioso) [23:24]
Scherzo (bewegt lebhaft) [ 10:04]
Sehr langsam (feierlich) [26:11]
FINAL THOUGHT:
Regardless of the poor audio on these Leningrad Masters recordings, the performance of the Leningrad Philharmonic and Mravinsky’s conducting shines through – and Brucker definitely goes out with a bang.
Recorded live at St. Florian, near Linz at the International Bruckner Festival 1996
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Sorry, Anton, this bloated bore of a Symphony is about as boring as it can get – and it’s not the band (or Pierre Boulez’s fault).
Anton Bruckner
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Ewald Mark (translated by Stewart Spencer)
THE PROJECT:
In September 1992, after a magnificent concert in London by the Vienna Philharmonic under Pierre Boulez, the conductor and the orchestra’s then managing director, Walter Blovsky, found themselves sitting next o each other at a reception and doing what conductors and orchestra managers like doing most of all; drawing up plans for the future.
When in the course of their conversation, Blovsky floated the idea of a performance of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony in the Abbey Church at St. Florian in September 1996. Boulez asked for time to think it over. After all, that would mean departing from the preferred practice of performing the work in the concert hall before recording it in the studio.
But the diaries of both the conductor and the orchestra allowed for only a live recording. It was not long, however, before Boulez gave the project his blessing after rehearsing at the Musikverein in Vienna, they would travel to Linz and stay there, with further rehearsals and the concerts themselves at St. Florian on 21 and 22 September. These would be filmed by Euroart and ORF and recorded by Deutsche Grammophon.
APPROACHES TO BRUCKNER:
In 1970, Boulez wrote an article for the Bayreuth Festival programme, “Approaches To Parsifal,” an article which, twenty-six years later in Vienna, encouraged me to ask the composer and conductor about his approach to Bruckner.
When Boulez receied his musical training between 1943 and 1946, Bruckner was virtually unknown in France – merely a name in books on the history of music, nothing more. According to Boulez, the general attitude to Bruckner was more or less that “he’s good enough for Central Europe but of no interest to us.”
But, as Boulez goes on, “there are two reasons why I can’t accept this point of view. First, the French have always been fanatical about Wagner, his chromatic language had a profound influence on them.
Pierre Boulez
Secondly, they have always been particularly receptive to this kind of harmonic language – at least from Debussy onwards. So I simply don’t understand why the French weren’t immediately conscious of the wonderful harmonic language, this lacyrinthine harmonic language.”
Charles Munch hailed from Alsace but taught at the Leipzig Conservatory while playing in the Gewandhaus Orchestra under Wilhelm Furtwangler and Bruno Walter. Pierre Montreux worked as guest conductor with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam alongside Willem Mengelberg. And Andrei Ouytens was the first Frenchman to conduct at Bayreuth.
All three men regularly conducted Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner in the concert hall and recording studio, while ignoring Bruckner’s works. It was left to Daniel Barenboim during his years with the Orcestre de Paris to introduce Brucker’s symphonies to French audiences. But for the musicians, too, these scores were terra incognita, and the orchestra even had to acquire a set of Wagner tubas in order to be able to produce the right sound.
The Eight Symphony Under Klemperer That Was The Fifth.
A key experience for the elderly Igor Stravinsky was a gramophone recording of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony with the Columbia Symphony Orchestra under Bruno Walter. Did Boulez have a similarly seminal experience with Bruckner?
The conductor recalls that during the 1960s he was often in London and regularly took the opportunity to hear Otto Klemperer conduct. He heard Beethoven, Mahler and, for the first time, Bruckner. When, in the course of the discussion mentioned at the outset, the question arose as to which of Bruckner’s symphonies he might like to conduct at a concert with the Vienna Philharmonic, he spontaneously chose the Eighth, because this, he said, was the work that had left such a deep impression on him when he had heard it under Klemperer with the Philharmonia Orchestra.
Otto Klemperer
Many years later Klemperer’s daughter Lotta explained that it had in fact been the Fifth that Boulez had heard on that occasion. To this day, Boulez remains uncertain as to whom he owes his introduction to the Eighth. But at least he now knows that ‘memory always counterfeits the very thing one wants to feel.’
A Plea In Favor Of the Haas Edition
Any performance of a Bruckner symphony naturally begs the question as to which edition to prefer. It is a question that Pierre Boulez has had to confront in turn. He decided in favor of the Haas edition, as it seemed to him that the cuts in the Nowak version are unnecessary. ‘They sometimes destroy the symmetry, logic and structure.’
Equally clear-cut was his decision to choose the ‘original version’ in preference to that of 1887: ‘In the 1887 version the first and fourth movements end in the same way, whereas in the ‘original version’ the epilogue of the opening movement dies away ppp.’
Pierre Boulez is also familiar with some of Bruckner’s letters and with the anecdotes that have grown up around the composer. There is a passage, for example, in which Bruckner expresses his ‘deep emotion and gratitude to the highly esteemed Philharmonic Society‘ on the occasion of the first performance of the Eighth Symphony in 1892.
As an example of opportunism, this takes some beating and strikes more or less the same note as Wagner’s letters to King Ludwig II. ‘For me,’ says Boulez, ‘the boundary between a composer’s life and works is uncrossable. Or, to put it another way, the score is always the main thing for me.’
After studying the score in detail, therefore, Boulez can image that the double-dotted rhythms may be played more tautly by the orchestra, very much as ears attuned to Stravinsky and Bartok might expect them to be played. But then, with typically French generosity, he qualifies his remark: ‘From the very outset, I accepted that I would undoubtedly get more from the orchestra than they would get from me.’
Acoustic Problems
Both as a member of the audience and as a conductor, Pierre Boulez has had ample experience of the vagaries of church acoustics. He still clearly remembers a performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie funebre et triomphaleat St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and the nerve-racking struggle of the solo trombones with the building’s infamous echo.
During the summer of 1975 he conducted Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the New York Philharmonic in Chartres Cathedral and recalls: ‘The performance of the fourth movement was ideal, but in the second and third movements in particular the audience heard absolutely nothing. Yet is was impossible to play it any slower, otherwise it would have lost all character. Because of this, one is willing to make compromises, but a compromise must not be taken too far.’
Vienna Philharmonic
When the Vienna Philharmonic performed Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony under Pierre Boulez in the Abbey Church of St. Florian in September 1996 – only weeks before the centanary of Bruckner’s death – it was unnecessary to make any such compromises. This, after all, is the church in whose crypt the composer lies buried in a simple sarcophagus placed beneath the great organ that bears his name.
Or to put it another way; a great 20th Century composer has been paid homage to one of the great composers of the 19th Century.
Ewald Markl (translation: Stewart Spencer)
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 8 in C Minor
Allegro Moderato [15:08]
Scherzo: Allegro Moderato – Trio, Langsam, Scherzo Da Capo [ 13:39]
Adagio: Feierlich Langsam, Doch Nicht Schleppend [24:52]
Finale: Feierlich, Nicht Schnell [22:19]
FINAL THOUGHT:
Come at me, Bruckner-ites – but I can’t get behind this one. The work, not the performance. It’s just a bore. Go back to Symphonies 3-6 for the good stuff.
Recorded 1980, Berliner Philharmonie – Berlin, West Germany
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
One word – ROUSING!
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ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Richard Osborne
“Listen to the music with reverence; for the composer meant what he said, and he was speaking of sacred things,” wrote Sir Donald Tovey of the Sixth Symphony’sslow movement.
It is well said, for this is wise and compassionate music, Sachs-like in its broodings. Tovey’s advocacy of the symphony in the early years of the century was remarkable then and would be remarkable now, for the Sixth– personal, economical, thrillingly shaped and scored – has never been much noticed by the wider musical public.
Anton Bruckner
During Bruckner’s lifetime only the Adagioand Scherzoof the Symphony were known. Wilhelm Jahn, director of the Vienna Hofoper, had conducted these two movements, to considerable acclaim, at a Philharmonic concert in Vienna in February 1883, seventeen months after the work’s completion.
But it was Gustav Mahler who brought the full score to public notice (albeit with cuts in some of the third subject groups and some revised orchestration) at a concert in Vienna in February 1899.
Mahler had long wanted to present a Bruckner symphony to the Philharmonic audience, and his choice was as enterprising as it was inspired. One wonders what Mahler made of the work in performance.
He was himself to write slow movements of omparable beauty, but his dance movements, with their persistent nostalgia, their recurrent irony, and their sophisticated orchestral method rarely, if ever, attempt to re-appropriate and re-fashion the classical scherzo as fascinatingly as Bruckner does.
Bruckner’s Trio, with its woodland horns and haunting sense of an Urwald far distant in time from our own, is a minor masterpiece in itself.
Like the trudging start to the Scherzo (which may or may not have given Mahler a germinal idea for his own Sixth Symphony), Bruckner’s music is rooted in certainties which Mahler all too rarely glimpsed.
Bruckner’s two outer movements are incluctably splendid; but they, too, follow a ground-plan, and an orchestral procedure, radically different from anything we encounter in Mahler.
Anton Bruckner – Statue – Vienna, Austria
Spacioius in design, swift in process, without a spare ounce of flesh on the orchestral texturing, the finale searches out the tonic A major– the key briefly burked out by trumpets and horns in bar 23 of the movement across a quietened, minor-key, nocturnal landscape.
During the course of the movement there are many arrivals on precipitate tonal steeps, as well as blander, blanket moments, abortive fermatas marking journey’s end.
“In Bruckner,” Robert Simpson has brilliantly observed, “the unexpected is inevitable, and the inevitable totally unexpected.” This is certainly true of the Sixth’sfinale. Its mood is by turns furtive, heroic, feverish, serene and assertive. Never, though, is it despairing. It is a movment marked by a heroic refusal to contemplate victory until all the possibilities of defeat have been squarely faced. Onlly out of doubt is faith born.
Berliner Philharmoniker
The first movement is almost unequivocally splendid! Is there a recapitulation in the history of the symphony between Beethoven and Silelius more unexpected or more thrilling that that at the heart of this particular movment?
The use of the drum is Beethovenian both as an harmonic pivot and as a source of awesome splendor in the orchestral texture; but though the effects are Beethovenian in origin they are entirely Brucknerian in their application.
Earlier, the movement begins with the note of C sharp pulsing like rapid morse high on the violins – though the crucial ideas are held, with typical Brucknerian reticence, low in the cellos and basses.
Herbert Von Karajan
Here, within a characteristically plain tonic and dominant ambit, an array of highly charged Neopolitan harmoniers give the music its special charisma, just as broad rhythmic formulations are soon to give focus to the exquisite lyrical episodes, the music made magical by the arcane loveliness of the kaleidoscopically changing inner rhythmic fragments.
By the code, as Tovey eloquently observes, the thematic inversions are ‘passing from key to key beneath a tumultuous surface, sparkling like the Homeric seas.’
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 6 in A Major
Majestoso [15:16]
Adagio: Sehr feierlich [18:58]
Scherzo: Nicht schnell – Trio, Langsam [7:52]
Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell [15:13]
FINAL THOUGHT:
If you’ve decided to listen to some Brucknertoday – start with this one. Your heart rate will rise. Most doctors say Bruckner’s 6th equals one hour of cardio.
Recorded January 20 and 21, 1991 – Severance Hall, Cleveland, Ohio
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
There are reasons why many people and critics are not fans of Bruckner’s 5thSymphony, this performance by the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Christoph Von Dohnanyi is not one them.
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ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Mark Audus
The Fifth is at once the most compelling and forbidding of Bruckner’s symphonies. The Finaleis one of the crowning glories of symphonic literature, but the road to it is fraught with pitfalls for the weak of heart.
Passages of blazing glory rub shoulders with others of great austerity: rich sonorities stand next to spare counterpoint, and earthy dance-music next to sublime lyricism. Such antitheses – hallmarks of all Brucker’s mature music – are particularly marked here and perhaps explain why this, one of the greatest of his symphonies, has never been among the best-loved.
Anton Bruckner at the piano
The composer himself may have recognized his exceptional achievement in the Fifth; and recounted to Richard Wagner: “Dr. Liszt played through my Fifth Symphony, and ‘proclaimed’ (his own words!) my virtues to [Prince] Hohenlohe, ‘My only consolation in Vienna!'”
Yet even Bruckner’s friends seem to have been daunted by the work, and it received only two performances in Bruckner’s lifetime; the first on April 20, 1887 (almost ten years after its completion) in an arrangement for two pianos by Josef Schalk, and the second on April 9, 1894 in a heavily cut and edited version by Franz Schalk (still to be heard until relatively recently) which the composer was mercifully too ill to attend.
Lying at the center of Bruckner’s symphonic oevre, the Fifth seems both to close the door on the early symphonies and to look forward to the mighty world of the late works. Indeed, a number of writers have described it as Janus-like, a metaphor that can be extended beyond the scope of Bruckner’s own works to that of a wider music history. For it seems as once to look back to the worlds of Classicism and the Baroque and forward to a new kind of music which fuses counterpoint and symphonic form.
Anton Bruckner – Statue – Vienna, Austria
The Janus metaphor may be applied on many levels, although the Fifth is full of thematic cross-references between the movements, the most obvious are between the second and third (both of which start with the same motif at different speeds) and the first and last – suggesting a symmetrical layout.
Such an observation is corroborated by the proportions of the of the movements, which are more evenly balanced than the beginning-heavy Seventh and the end-heavy Eighth. We might even suggest that Bruckner composed the work ‘inside out.’
Composition began (on February 14, 1875) with the Adagio, followed by the first movement, the Scherzoand Trio, and the Finale(May 1877). Subsequent revisions brought Bruckner full-circle to complete the Adagioby January 4, 1878.
Bruckner dedicated the Fifth Symphony to ‘his Excellency Herr Carl von Stremayr, Imperial Minister for Culture And Education.’ This is particularly appropriate, for not only did Stremayr help secure Bruckner a professorship in harmony and counterpoint at Vienna University, but this is also the most ‘learned’ of Bruckner’s symphonies.
It is difficult to apply the term ‘programme music’ in the conventional sense to any of these works, the Fourth comes the closest, but the Fifth lays greater claim to the description of ‘absolute music.’
The beginning of the slow introduction – unique in Bruckner’s symphonies and itself a ‘Classical’ feature – can almost be heard in terms of an exercise in species counterpoint. Both the introduction and the following Allegroseem to be ‘about’ avoiding the implied tonic chord, so that even the first subject quickly veers to the minor mode, and though the tonic is finally achieved, the whole movement still has an introductory feel about it.
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 5in B Flat Major
Introduction: Adagio – Allegro [19:41]
Sehr langsam [18:10]
Scherzo: Molto vivace – Trio [13:05]
Finale: Allegro molto [22:53]
FINAL THOUGHT:
I mean, definitely not my go to when I have a hankering for Bruckner. That said, it does have some damn fine rousing moments!
I mean, it’s Bruckner’s Seventh – who can screw this up – certainly not Herbert Von K!
Anton Bruckner
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Richard Osborne, 1975
The Seventh Symphony is perhaps Bruckner’s most perfectly wrought work, his richest, most luminous utterance.
It was begun with the Scherzoin 1881, droll, dancing and humane. Then in 1882, under the spell of Wagner’s Parsifal, Bruckner began work on the beautiful first movement, a movement of aspiring eloquences whose principal theme, the composer tell us, came to him (scored for a viola) in a dream.
The Adagio is said to have been written under the influence of a premonition of Wagner’s death; indeed, its coda, a profound and solemn threnody, was redrafted when news arrived from Venice on February 13, 1883, of the Master’s passing.
Completed later in 1883, the Symphony received its first performance under Arthur Nikisch, in Leipzig on December 30, 1884. The work was dedicated, not to the memory of Wagner (Bruckner invariably chose living dedicates, among whom he numbered Almighty God), but to Wagner’s patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
It was well liked, and as the revised autograph was used by the printers of the first edition, it offers a rare example in the Bruckner canon of a clean text, through the anonymously scrawled phrase ‘gilt nicht’ (not valid) over the timpani, triangle and cymbal at the Adagio’secstatic climax has excited controversy. The cymbal was probably Nikisch’s idea; but cymbal clashes are not necessarily banal. They can be emblems of light and divine revelation, as Wagner himself shows in the Prelude to Lohengrin.
Certainly most eminent Bruckner conductors see fit to include the cymbal, ‘valid’ or not. Some editions (but not Robert Haas) also include meddlesome tempo markings which, along with other ‘traditional’ effects, can, if followed, seriously detract from the movement’s single vision. But this is not a problem which need detain us in this set. Karajan’s whole, luminous way with the later Bruckner symphonies is well known – has, indeed, been one of the glories of the European musical scene for four decades.
The theme that launches the Seventh Symphony is one of the loveliest, and longest, Bruckner ever wrote; a glorious, sweeping melody on the cellos spanning two-octaves.
Always longer than one remembered, it sweeps down, up and and across; hill, valley and a whole ample landscape beyond. As one paragraph ended, another begins, even more serene, the eye now travelling upwards and outwards from the earth – one of the most beguiling and characteristic tricks of romantic landscape art, with its love of sweeping vistas and intimations of immortality beyond.
A second them in B major on oboes and clarinet, and recognizable by its discreet ‘Wagnerian’ appoggiatura, intrudes, adding a different kind of radiance, a deeper distance, to the music and it, too, is answered with quiet ecstasy.
But, as so often in Bruckner, a pizzicato figure brings new life; a climax is gestated, itself gestatory, for from it a third and finale theme is born; a naive dancing motive in fustian octaves, not unlike the germ cell of the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, though more home spun.
Herbert Von Karajan
Climaxes in the Seventh Symphony are rarely climactic as they are in the Eighth. A triple forte arrives, but it strikes no terror in our hearts and leads to one of Bruckner’s most spacious meditations, the page almost bereft of notes.
Only the eye perceives the V-shape of the opening theme spread by the clarinets, while the oboe arches above (a shape which will usher in the movement’s coda) and the trombones cluster beneath, a humped, rock outcrop. Twice the rustic third theme fits across our view high on the flute, until the flute, finding voice, undergoes a symbolic transformation – becomes a a dove descending, ushering in a passage for cellos (soon to be gloriously extended) which recalls Parsifaland the mysteries of the Grail.
Anton Bruckner – Statue – Vienna, Austria
The third subject returns, the basses, mocking, inverting it step by step until it steals away in an elfin motion on the solo flute. Another climax bursts, full of striding V-formations. But serenity is the movement’s keynote and the next climax, after an arcane and (for this Symphony) surprisingly long recapitulation-cum-development, rides in, aptly enough, on the dancing third subject.
Out of the ensuing silence part of the movement’s opening theme emerges; then a bridge passage of great harmonic beauty; and finally, the coda peacefully, radiantly ushered in by the chameleon flutes while, beneath, tremolando strings conjure an ecstatic ground swell and the brass prepare to resound the great movement proudly home.
The Adagiobegins with a glorious, imposing utterance on violas and Wagner tubas in a key, C sharp minor, skillfully avoided until now. Then, in the fourth bar, a second theme appears in the strings, a deep-throated hymn similar in outline to the ‘non confundar’ of the Te Deum.
A long, undulating, contemplatively beautiful extension of the strings main subject leads to a short climax from which violins and clarinets sweep solemnly down to horns and tubas poised on the second subject’s very edge.
The subject, when it comes, is something of a surprise; one of Bruckner’s most winningly accessible melodies floated off the beat, graciously in 1/4 time in the courtly and chivalrous key of F-sharp.
The opening measures return, still in C-sharp minor and even more massively impressive, until the music, sweeping onwards and upwards, reaches a C major climax and a wonderful series of stark, antiphonal statements – flutes and oboes, horns, sotto voce strings and, finally, trombones erecting keys like royal standards before the regal G major climax is bowed nobly in.
Bruckner’s slow movements could often end halfway through, so marked in the mid-way caesura. But the second subject now returns in fantastic guise, the first violins wreathing laurel leaves in its hair. Again, the music pauses, but a brief transition leads us more swiftly than we dared imagine into a reiteration of the tubas’ solemn theme.
Anton Bruckner
This time, though, the strings’ caressing motion tells of imminent apotheosis. Wave upon wave of sound – as glorious a preparation as Bruckner ever penned – lead us to the disputed climax; C major, triangle, timpani and resounding cymbal giving out, with the full orchestra, a climactic triple forte.
The coda, by contrast, is cavernous and grand; a eulogy to the dead Wagner, with one magnificent horn crescendo and an octave fall of the violins’ C sharp that unburdens the soul. In a sense, this grand movement seems no longer than a slow movement by the mature Mozart – a tribute to the profundity and reach of Mozart’s music; but a tribute, too, to the depth and succinctness of Bruckner himself, who even in this majestic Symphony remains decisively within the pale of the greatest of all symphonic traditions.
The Scherzois gloriously all of a piece, with its steadily dancing motive rhythm and the proud cock-crow of the trumpets (the familiar description – though whether cocks crow in such exemplary fourths, fifths and octave leaps must be a matter for ornithological verification).
The dipping string theme nine bars in has to English ears, something of an Elgarian feel to it. The Trio, by contrast, is a rich song of summer, quarried from the Scherzo’sopening pulse, beginning in F major but moving radiantly beyond before its nostalgically songful returns.
That the darting opening theme of the Finale is related to the Symphony’s opening is an interesting, if somewhat academic, point. More significant is its terse ‘humorous’ quality (Haydn could have used it). Rather more familiar ground is reached in teh second subject, a lovely broad chorale, complete with Wagnerian appoggiatura and the familiar stalking Bruckner bass. And to these elements a third is joined, for in a series and mock-heroic confrontations.
A minor solemnly vies with C major, and A flat major vies with both, in a quest for tonic status. At one point the violin break cover, soaring imposingly upwards, and it is only with the solemn, schoolmasterly intervention of the Wagner tubas that the debate is temporarily stilled.
Berliner Philharmoniker
From here, themes are suddenly and surprisingly inverted (a familiar Bruckner device), another battle is joined and an even bigger climax achieved, C major sailing out of the fray, after a suitably pregnant silence, with the lovely chorale (prize booty, indeed) safely stowed.
No doubt Bruckner’s humor, like Wordsworth’s, will strike many by its meagerness alone. But blunt, and quirky and abstruse as it may seem, this finale reconciles dignity and humor in a remarkable way. Brevity, they say, is the soul of wit, and this Finale (gloriously scored) is, by Brucknerian standards, brief to the point of being abrupt. But if its opening theme could indeed have been used by Haydn, and if the joyous repetitions in the coda suggest the Olympian playfulness of Beethoven at the end of his Eight Symphony, the mix as a whole remains indelibly Brucknerian.
For terse and witty as this finale is, it has – once E major reestablishes its hold upon the rock face, which it does soon after the chorale’s return – not only ebullience to its credit but a kind of cosmic sufficiency, hymning us, as only Bruckner can, with an invincible splendor.
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TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 7 in E Major
Allegro moderato – [20:06]
Adagio, Sehr feierlich und seh langsam – [21.55]
Scherzo, Sehr schnell – [9:50]
Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht schnell – [12:26]
FINAL THOUGHT:
An awesome work and an incredible performance – but, man, those liner notes are so annoying and so overwritten. Still – a top notch, hall of fame worthy recording.
Recorded 1970, Jesus Christus Kirche, Berlin, Germany; Remastered 1987
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
I mean, it’s Bruckner, it’s von Karajan, and it’s the Berliner Philharmoniker… what could go wrong? Not much.
Anton Bruckner
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Peter Branscombe, 1985
Bruckner wrote his Fourth Symphony in 1874, but between 1878 and 1880 he revised it twice, completely replacing the scherzo and finale. In its new form the work was successfully performed at a Vienna Philharmonic concert under Hans Richter on February 20, 1881. The symphony was nevertheless subjected to further reworkings in 1886 and 1887-1888, but it is in the 1878-80 version that it is normally heard.
Anton Bruckner – Statue – Vienna, Austria
I. Bewegt, nict zu schnell: Over shimmering ppp strings there rings out the horn-call that will dominate the first movement and return at the end of the finale. With a typical two-plus-three rising figure Bruckner introduces his second thematic complex. A sonorous tutti gives way to a woodbird call in the violins.
The development ranges from the quietest of woodland musings to the full roar of striding tutti and resonant chorale, and the recapitulation creates the impression of a familiar landscape viewed from a new vantage point. Though the coda steals in quietly, even menacingly, this is to be a passage of the utmost splendor.
Anton Bruckner
II. Andante quasi Allegretto: Although the typical Bruckner Adagio lies in the future, there is a solemnity about this lovely movement that on its own terms is quite as impressive.
Cello cantilena, a quiet chorale and a beautiful viola melody prove the principal material for this boldly modulating, questing movement. The principal theme is heard for the last time in the coda. Then, after a powerful climax, the movement dies away with tonic and dominant timpani-taps and pizzicato chords.
Herbert von Karajan
III. Scherzo – Bewegt: There is no precedent for the splendid ‘hunting’ Scherzowhich – along in Bruckner’s symphonies – is in 2/4 rather than 3/4 time.
In two-plus-three rhythm the horns launch their calls ever more intensely above hazy strings; the heavy brass join in before a gentler string response, but there are also eerie phrases to come. The Trio, Nicht zu schnell, Keinesfalls schleppend, presents a magical period of calm; the sudden shift back to the reprise of the Scherzois an exciting moment.
Berliner Philharmoniker
IV. Finale: Bewegt, doch nict zu schnell: The movement opens in an ominous B-flat minor, with clarinets and first horn enunciating a falling three-note figure which will become important at the first tutti, where it is answered by the two-plus-three note-pattern that has already been remarked on.
This powerful paragraph (it looks back to the theme of the Scherzoand the rhythm of the opening movement) closes in a firm E-flat; a drop in tempo users in the second subject on the upper strings, in C minor.
The C major theme that comes next is almost vacuous by comparison, and what follows reveals that Bruckner has not yet attained full master of the symphonic finale.
The coda, however, is a wonderful achievement; horns emerge from a wash of woodwind to stride purposefully towards a majestic final peroration.
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TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 4in E-Flat Minor – ‘Romantic’
Bewegt, nicht zu schnell – 20:37
Andante quasi Allegretto – 15:28
Scherzo: Bewegt – Trio, Nicht zu schnell, Keinesfalls schleppend – 10:33
Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell – 23:02
FINAL THOUGHT:
Don’t like the piece? Fine. Don’t really like Bruckner? Okie-dokie. But this performance cannot be denied. A perfect match of music, conductor and orchestra.
Recording Location: Dorothy Chandler Pavillion, Los Angeles, May 12-13, 1997
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
A great performance by a great orchestra with a great conductor of an ALMOST great symphony.
Anton Bruckner
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES by Tim Page:
Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) is a decidedly idiosyncratic Olympian. He has never been one of those composers beloved by almost everybody (as might be said of Mozart or Beethoven) and, throughout much of the world, we do not inevitably expect to find a Bruckner work on the schedules of our symphony orchestras. Brucker’s statue might be likened to that of Hector Berlioz or Jean-Philippe Rameau; nobody doubts his greatness, but his work remains relatively unknown to the casual concertgoer.
Still, those listeners who like Bruckner’s music at all usually love it deeply. if he may still be considered something of a ‘cult’ composer, his is among the most passionate of such cults. Watch the audience at a performance of one of Bruckner’s symphonies sometimes. Half of the people in attendance will seem to know every note by heart, submerging themselves in meditation as the work progresses, smiling when a particularly beatific passage for strings shimmers by, sitting up sharply as the timpani usher in yet another vast, churning crescendo. And woe to any critic who presumes to doubt the faith!
The three Bruckner symphonies we hear most often are probably the sweeping and spacious Symphony No. 8, the Symphony No. 9 he left unfinished at his death (one wonders whether anybody could have written music to follow the glorious conclusion of the Adagio, one of the most serenely exalted leavetakings in history) and the Symphony No. 4, which Bruckner himself christened the ‘Romantic.’
Traditionally, Bruckner has been linked with Richard Wagner. While Bruckner undoubtedly worshiped Wagner (going so far as to dedicate his third symphony to him), today, more than a century later, the two men seem less and less alike.
Anton Bruckner
Wagner’s music is restless and charged with tension; we follow it with a near-theatrical curiosity about where it may lead. Bruckner’s work, on the other hand, is often slow-moving and even static; at times, despite the composer’s large orchestral forces, he seems a sort of 19th-century proto-minimalist.
We listen to his symphonies with the pleasing sense that we have already arrived at our destination before the music started and we are now proceeding to immerse ourselves in it, with piety and gratitude. Some lines from T.S. Eliot have always seemed particularly appropriate to Bruckner:
We shall not cease from exploration,
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Bruckner wrote the Symphony No. 4 in 1874, but went on to revise it in 1878 and then to rewrite the finale in 1879-1880. Later, he even went so far as to tinker with it some more (in 1886 and 1887-1888) but it is the 1878-1880 version that is usually heard today.
He gave the work the subtitle ‘Romantic’in 1876 and even added a literary program to go along with it. And so the opening of the first movement was described thus: ‘A citadel of the Middle Ages. Daybreak. Reveille is sounded from the tower, The gates open. Knights on proud charges leap forth. The magic of nature surrounds them.’
Such effusion has gone out of fashion – and, indeed, it seems that Bruckner himself had mixed emotions about what he was doing. By the finale, he had pretty much given up the effort: ‘In the last movement I’ve forgotten completely what picture I had in mind,’ he wrote, with refreshing candor.
None of this should have mattered to him, of course, for the ‘Romantic’ Symphony works very well indeed as ‘absolute music,’ and we need not concern ourselves with knights and citadels to admire and understand it.
The approximately 70+ minute work is scored for two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, bass tuba, three kettledrums, and a large string section.
Los Angeles Philharmonic
The first movementis long and grand, with an early emphasis on the horn, and some typically expansive development in the strings and brass. (The range between Bruckner’s loudest and softest passages in this movement is unusually pronounced.) The solemn second movement, marked Andante, includes some unusual modulations, a graceful melody for the viola and a lowing chorale.
The third movement brings the horn back to the center of activity; this Scherzois based on hunting calls, although there is a calm central section that harkens back to minuet form. The finalestarts with some ominous passages for horn and clarinets, with the theme working its way into some noble writing for the trumpets. A long, busy contrapuntal development follows before Bruckner users in a blazing, triumphant and completely successful conclusion to the gigantic work.
Lawrence Gilman, for many years the chief music critic of the New York Herald-Tribune, once summed up the special appeal of Bruckner: ‘For a few, he was, and is, at rare intervals, a seer and a prophet – one who knew the secret of a strangely exalted discourse. Rapt and transfigured, he saw visions and dreamed dreams as colossal, as grandiose, as awful in lonely splendor, as those of William Blake. We know that for Bruckner, too, some ineffable beauty flamed and sank and flamed again across the night.’
And so it does.
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TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 4in E-Flat Minor – ‘Romantic’
Bewegt, nicht zu schnell – 20:10
Andante quasi Allegretto – 17:01
Scherzo: Bewegt – Trio, Nicht zu schnell, Keinesfalls schleppend – 11:01
Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell – 21:30
FINAL THOUGHT:
Until my most recent re-listening of this symphony, I simply remembered it as what absolutely had to be the inspiration for the opening music of ‘Star Trek.’ don’t believe me? Listen to Bruckner’s 4th first – and then to the ”Star Trek’ opening.
Recording Location: Het Concertgebouw, December 1994 – Live Recording
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
Now we’re talking!
Anton Bruckner
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES – “Anton Bruckner: An Antenna Pointing Into The 20th Century” – Nikolaus Harnoncourt In Conversation With Walter Dobner
W.D.: According to one 19th-Century review of the Third Symphony, “Bruckner has his moments -flashes of imagination of a kind found only with great men on genius – but they are soon past.” I don’t suppose you share this view, Herr Harnoncourt?
N.H.: Not for a moment. But nor do I share the view of contemporary critics of Beethoven’s Second Symphony. None the less, there’s some truth in the suggestion that a transcendent genius like Bruckner – or any other great composer for that matter – positively invites disapproval and criticism. You can’t expect people to agree completely with such music.
The whole meaning of a work is revealed only by contradiction. It’s only when you ask what happens between these flashes of genius that you may find a lot happening that may not appear so brilliant after all.
There was a time when I myself saw Bruckner in this light. I felt I was returning home from a Bruckner symphony with a relatively small number of very important discoveries. But the symphonies were too great for that.
Today, I’ve changed my mind completely, since I now understand much better what this music is all about.
Anton Bruckner
W.D.: Can you say in a few words what you mean by that?
N.H.: The experience I had with Bruckner was similar to the one I had with Beethoven. I initially had great problems with the finale of both the Ninth Symphony and Fidelio. They struck me as too distended and, in consequence, as seriously lacking in substance. Only later did it become clear to me that I was approaching this music with the wrong standard.
In the case of the Missa solemnis I suddenly saw that it was simply absurd to judge Beethoven by Mozart’s standards. Beethoven makes other demands , asks other questions and so he got other answers. As soon as I set aside my “Mozart” yardstick and found one that seemed to me better suited to Beethoven, I suddenly discovered a whole new approach to his works.
Exactly the same thing happened with Bruckner. The more I got to know Brahms, the more precious Bruckner became. It was presumably the great effort and seriousness of Brahm’s writing that produced such wonderful results after years of polishing and honing and that led me to his antithetical opposite, Bruckner, bringing him closer and closer to me.
W.D.: Is Bruckner not also so difficult to understand because there are so many different links? Although his music speaks the language of the 19th century, it is also deeply indebted on a formal level to the Classical 18th century, to say, nothing of the gestures – and mysticism – of the Middle Ages.
N.H.: Curiously enough, Bruckner strikes me – far more than any other composer of his generation – as someone with an antenna pointing into the 20th century. When people claim that it was Mahler who laid the foundation of the Second Viennese School, I have to say that this seems to me to have been even more true of Bruckner – not that I would want to disagree with any of the criteria you’ve listed.
Those aspects that go back to the Middle Ages are presumably tied up in some way with Bruckner’s markedly rustic character. But I don’t think it’s possible to approach his works from a biographical standpoint. If you were to start out from Bruckner’s personality, you’d expect to find extreme conservatism in his works. But his visions really can’t be squared with his simplicity as a person. In this respect, he is unique as a genius.
W.D.: But is it really possible to draw a total distinction between Bruckner as a person and Bruckner as a composer? Shouldn’t the thematic triality of his symphonic movements be seen not only as a symbol of the Trinity but also as evidence of Bruckner’s personal faith? What are your thoughts on this and on the theory that only a believer can interpret Bruckner?
N.H.: I don’t think faith comes into it. Anyone who performs Bruckner needs to be familiar with Austrian music, with Schubert, with peasant music and the whole ländler thing. I wouldn’t dare try to find evidence of Bruckner’s religious beliefs in the symbols of his music.
It may well be that these signs of personal belief does exist, but biographers, exegetes and musicologists who explain this only on the basis of the works, without the composer’s say so, are guilty, I believe, of venturing into a highly dangerous and highly speculative area.
For me, Brucker’s symphonies are couched in a language of musical sounds that is his very own, personal language. That his personality was very strongly influenced by his faith is sufficiently well attested. Whether his music would sound different without this pronounced religious influence, I don’t think any of us can say. But I think it’s far too simple as an explanation to derive this thematic triality from the Trinity.
W.D.: The ‘Musician of God,’ is only one of many Brucknerian cliches. Bruckner is also sometimes regarded as a typically Austrian composer. It’s argued that he takes his place in a line beginning with Schubert and leading to Mahler and, finally, to Schoenberg.
N.H.: I’d describe only highly concrete details of his music as typically Austrian, for example, the Triosin his Scherzosand a few melodic ideas that I associate with Bruckner’s rustic origins or with elements of Austrian folk music.
With Schubert, it’s totally different – he could only be Austrian, his music speaks Viennese dialect. The line of development that starts out with Schubert certainly leads in Bruckner’s general direction, but it actually goes, rather, to Johann Strauss; that’s pure unadulterated Austrian music for you.
There seems to me a very clear line of development from Bruckner to the Second Viennese School, especially to Alban Berg, rather less so to Schoenberg, although Schoenberg often transcribed Strauss.
I’m happy to leave out Mahler – he’s really not conceivable without Bruckner. I regard Bruckner’s music as absolute. The autobiographical element in his music isn’t all that marked. Unlike Mahler, who uses Bruckner’s vocabulary, Bruckner does not retell his own life in a superficial way. I see a basic difference between a composer who sees himself as the agent of his talent and one who uses the vocabulary of a composer like Bruckner in order to tell us all about his private sufferings.
W.D.: Herr Harnoncourt, you say that Mahler is inconceivable without Bruckner. Is Bruckner conceivable without Wagner?
N.H.: Certainly. The links between Bruckner and Wagner must have been in the air at the time. You can already hear Wagner and Tchaikovsky in a number of Mendelssohn’s works – I’m thinking of Die erste Walpurgisnacht and Die schöne Melusine. Virtually the whole of the 19th century is contained in these works.
One has the feeling that if Mendelssohn had had a normal lifespan, Wagner would have been inhibited by such proximity. I don’t think there is anything in Wagner’s musical language that wasn’t already part of the spirit of the times. Wagner had to exist in the 19th century. Bruckner had to exist as a writer of symphonies, not as a music dramatist. The fact that Bruckner revered Wagner I see as a sign of his modesty.
W.D.: Herr Harnoncourt, you’re beginning your explanation of the world of Bruckner’s symphonies with his Third Symphony, of which there are three different versions. Why did you opt for the second version?
N.H.: The final version was ruled out for me on account of its excessive cuts and excisions that almost destroy the work’s organic unity. For me, it’s a makeshift solution designed to keep the symphony in the running, as it were.
The first version is very complex and rambling, with a lot of Wagnerian quotations. I could well imagine conducting this first version after extensive preparation. I see the second version as the result of Bruckner’s wrestling with the first one. Also, I think that the coda to the Scherzoprovides a very interesting and convincing ending here. I think Brucker knew perfectly well how he imagined his works would sound and that he set this down quite clearly.
He said: “My work is in the score.” But although he worked on the score, he did not – so to speak – prepare it in bite-sized morsels. The versions that various friends and conductors forced out of him were concessions to these friends and to audiences, prompted by the wish to be performed at all.
W.D.: And which edition of this symphony did you decide to use for your own performance?
N.H.: I’m conducting the second version in Nowak’s edition, since it’s the one I find most convincing. You must never forget that fashion plays an important part here, too. Now that we’re familiar with Nowak’s versions, we know how he arrived at his findings. The sources are available.
Of course, one could now try reaching one’s own conclusions and results on the strength of the sources. That’s the prerogative of every generation. I trusted Nowak more than I normally trust editors and haven’t reexamined every question on the basis of the sources in order to make my own decisions, but compared the various findings of the individual editions.
I also consulted an edition from the Concergebouw Orchestra, with whom I made this recording, since I also wanted to learn more about this orchestra’s tradition.
W.D.: Not only the Royal Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra can look back on a long tradition of performing Bruckner, so, too, can the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, with whom you began your career as a musician. They, too, have considerable experience of playing Bruckner’s works. To what extent was this knowledge of the performing tradition of use to you during your present involvement with Bruckner, or did you fell inhibited by it?
N.H.: These experiences were of great use to me and certainly didn’t inhibit me. The older I get, the more natural Bruckner’s musical language seems to me. I feel at home here, it’s the element in which I live and breathe. I can recall some very great performances of Bruckner while I was a cellist with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra.
I’m thinking in particular of Karajan during the 1950s. I’d be interested to hear those performances again and would like to know whether my experience at that time – I’d not yet turned thirty – would stand up to my present understanding. But they left an indelible impression on me.
In the case of the present performance, it was important for me to work with an orchestra that knows and understands Bruckner’s language. At the same time, of course, I had to fight against this experience at rehearsals, since there are certain passages that are interpreted in identical ways by virtually every conductor.
I’m thinking, for example, of the decelerandos, especially in the slow movement of the Third Symphony; the answers in the orchestra are almost always taken twice as slowly as the questions. There isn’t the slightest indication in the score that this is how these passages should be taken. And yet orchestras are used to playing them like this.
But when a composer like Bruckner writes even the tiniest change of tempo into the score and when he prescribes even the least expressive nuance by means of footnotes and explanations, I’m tempted to agree with him and included to clear away all this ballast.
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Within twenty-four hours of his meeting with Wagner in Bayreuth in September 1873, Anton Bruckner could no longer remember whether the Master had accepted the dedication of his Secondor Third Symphony.
Remarkable though this lapse must seem, contemporary accounts make it plain that Bruckner’s uncertainty was due not so much to his awesome encounter with a man whom he revered as “the master of all masters” as to the vast amounts of beer that he and Wagner had consumed.
With his memory of this historic encounter decidedly befuddled, Bruckner sent the older composer a note in an attempt to resolve the matter. “Symphony in D minor, where the trumpet begins the theme?,” he asked, to which Wagner appended his reply: “Yes, yes! Best wishes!”
The first draft of the score was completed by the end of the year, and Cosima Wagner confirmed receipt of the dedication copy on June 24, 1874. Shortly afterwards, Brucker offered his new symphony to the Vienna Philharmonic, but the orchestra rejected the piece after a trial run-through in the autumn of 1875.
As with so many of Bruckner’s works, the original version of the score proved only the starting point of a whole series of major revisions.
The ink on the dedication copy was scarcely dry before Bruckner had already set out to make ‘significant improvements to the Wagner Symphony (in D minor),’ to quote from a letter to Moritz von Mayfeld, but the result was not yet an independent version, for this, we have to wait until the thoroughgoing version of 1876/77, when Brucker added the ‘Adagio No. 2′ (1876) and produced an intermediate version that occupies a halfway house between the first and second versions. (As a result, there are a total of four versions of the slow movement – something of a rarity in the history of music – and three different versions of the symphony as a whole.)
On April 28, 1877, Bruckner finally added a note to the concluding movement ‘entirely new revision finished.’ The second version, Bruckner though, was now complete.
The work was premiered in this form in December 1877 and, notoriously, proved a failure. But Bruckner refused to be daunted and in January 1878 made a further series of changes to this second version, including the addition of a coda to the Scherzo. The second major revision dates from 1888/89, when Franz Schalk played a decisive role and incurred the charge of ‘foreign interference’ in the score. In this revised form the work found favor with its audiences.
The question of “failure” and “success” lead us straight to the heart of the problems surrounding the different versions. To a certain extent we are dealing here with “improvements” designed to accommodate the work to audience expectations. There is no doubt that Bruckner craved success and constantly sought recognition, avidly reading reviews. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion, therefore, that it was only those works that had proved an initial failure that were subjected to a process of revision, either by Bruckner himself or by others.
(It is surely significant in this context that the Seventh Symphony, with which the composer made his international breakthrough, was left untouched.) Legion are Bruckner’s remarks reflecting his conformist outlook and his willingness to make concessions.
In consequence, the various versions are assessed in different ways by musicians and scholars. For some, the principal aspect is the process of improvement, whereas others acknowledge the independence of each individual version.
It is important to realize that the changes should not be approached from a purely qualitative standpoint but must be examined in the light of the circumstances that produced them and the period at which they were made. Give the length of time that Bruckner devoted to the Third Symphony – a total of sixteen years – it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a ‘work in progress.’
In what ways do the three versions differ? This question is normally answered by reference to cuts, although this affects only one, albeit important, aspect. A comparison of the overall length of the symphony in all three versions reveals that, whereas the first version is 2056 bars long, the second runs to 1815 bars and the third is 1644 bars in length. But even here we must proceed with caution since the cuts do not affect all the movements equally. The Scherzois the exception to the rule inasmuch as it is eight bars longer in the second and third versions.
Further changes affect the structure of the musical periods, a process that Bruckner himself called ‘rhythmic ordering.’ In the transitions he strove to achieve a greater interweaving of the motifs, with denser textures in the long ascents to climaxes that so often fail to materialize.
He also altered the accompanying figures and instrumentation. In the case of the Third Symphony, there is also the question of Bruckner’s collage-like use of fifteen Wagnerian quotations, the vast majority of which had already disappeared by the time of the second version, a change no doubt dictated by the composer’s wish to reduce the work’s powerfully subjective content and, at the same time, emphasize its autonomy.
The second version is closely tied up wit the Concertgebouw’s Brucknerian tradition; the Third Symphony was the first of the composer’s symphonies to be played by the Amsterdam orchestra, when Willem Kes conducted a performance on October 13, 1892.
In 1897, Willem Mengelberg conducted the local premiere of the Fourth Symphony, and the Ninthwas introduced to Amsterdam audiences in 1908. A period of particularly intense interest in Bruckner began with Eduard van Beinum, who was appointed the Concertgebouw’s second conductor in 1931 and who once said of the composer: ‘Bruckner is my daily bread. I can never get enough of his music.’
Many outstanding performances of Bruckner’s symphonies too place under van Beinum’s baton, although they continued to be based on the seriously deficient first editions of the scores. Only slowly was Robert Haas’s old Bruckner Edition of the 1930s adopted.
In the sixties, Eugen Jochum and Bernard Haitink showed themselves to be Brucknerians of the first rank. While Jochum soon came to prefer Nowak’s new edition, Haitink remained loyal to Haas. Haitink was succeeded in 1988 by Riccardo Chailly, who has continued the Concertgebouw’s longstanding – and outstanding – Bruckner tradition.
Erich W. Partsch
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TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 3 in D Minor – “Wagner”
Gemäßigt, mehr bewegt, misterioso – 19:29
Andante: Bewegt, feierlich, quasi Adagio – 13:26
Scherzo: Zeimlich schnell – 7:02
Finale: Allegro – 14:37
FINAL THOUGHT:
Insanely long liner notes not withstanding, Bruckner’s Third Symphony is the one that turned the world in favor of Bruckner. And, thank God. If Bruckner’s 6th didn’t exist – it would have really sucked.
Male Voices: Rundfunkchor Berlin and the Ernst-Senff-Chor
Berliner Philharmoniker
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
A nice performance of a ‘meh’ Symphony (which, I believe, would have been Bruckner’s review as well).
Anton Bruckner
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES – Sebastian Urmoneit (Translation Stewart Spencer)
Dating from 1865/66, Bruckner’s C minor Symphony was the Austrian composer’s first attempt to explore a field which, in the minds of all 19th-century composers of instrumental music, represented the ultimate challenge.
Neither his “Study Symphony” in F Minor, nor his D Minor Symphony which he himself later “nullified,” satisfied the high standards he set himself and that he expected of the genre.
As we know, Brahms, too, hesitated long and hard before publishing a symphony, and by the time that his first contribution to the medium was unveiled, he was already well established as a composer.
Bruckner, by contrast, was barely known outside Linz in the mid-1860s, even though he had already completed two Masses. According to his own later account, it was the local music critic, Moritz von Mayfeld, who encouraged him to explore the world of the symphony, a world to which Bruckner was to remain loyal for the whole of the rest of his life.
Mayfeld ended his review of the first performance of Bruckner’s D minor Mass with the words: “Such is his unusually fertile imagination and his musical and technical knowledge that it is hard to predict where he may go from here. But one thing is certain, namely, that he will very soon cultivate the field of the symphony and to do so, moreover, with the greatest success.”
Anton Bruckner
We know that from at least the time of his studies with the Linz Kappelmeister, Otto Kitzler, Bruckner was not only familiar with the music of Beethoven but had also been introduced to the opera of Wagner through a performance of “Tannhauser” that Kitzler conducted at the theatre in the town.
From Beethoven, Bruckner took over the symphony’s four-movement structure and even left untouched the distinctive character of all four of those movements: First movement Sonataform – Adagio– Scherzo– Finale.
From his First Symphony onwards, however, he based his symphonic expositions not one two subjects but on three; a compositional device previously found to such a clearly developed extent only in Schubert’s “Great” C Major Symphony.
A comparison between the two First Symphonies of Bruckner and Brahms shows certain similarities; not only are both in C Minor, but the sombre tonality of the opening is brightened in their final movements, both of which are in C Major.
In each case, the model is Beethoven’s Fifth. More striking than their similarities, however, are their dissimilarities, not least in their approach to the whole history of the genre.
Daniel Barenboim
In order for it to be fully understood, Brahms’ First Symphony seems to presuppose two whole centuries of music history as a living force, whereas Bruckner approached his task with an almost naïve insouciance, seeming not to suffer from the oppressive weight of tradition.
While his First Symphony is far from denying the age in which it was written, no other composer of his stature has been able to animate the elemental forces of rhythm and melody with such unrefracted immediacy and – at least in his First Symphony – to fall back so nonchalantly on Wagner’s harmonic innovations.
The German musicologist Stefan Kuntz has characterized this note of purity in early Bruckner by reference to a remark of Nietzsche’s which, although written with Wagner in mind, is undoubtedly better suited, in Kunze’s view, to Bruckner: “He who desired to liberate art, to restore its desecrated sanctity, would first have to have liberated himself from the modern soul; only when innocent himself could he discover the innocence of art.”(Untimely Meditations: Richard Wagner in Bayreuth.)
This natural simplicity of tone is a feature, above all, of the original Linz version of the symphony, a more elemental account of the piece that Bruckner later revised in 1890/91 to produce the so-called Vienna version of the work.
Rundfunkchor Berlin
The symphonic chorus Helgolandfor male-voice choir and orchestra was Bruckner’s last completed composition. The only other piece on which he worked after 1893 was his Ninth Symphony, which was to remain unfinished at his death.
Although Helgolandis little known today, it is clear from Bruckner’s last will and testament that he himself numbered it among his most important works, worth – in his opinion – of being ranked alongside his nine symphonies, three Masses, String Quintet, Te Deum and his setting of Psalm 150.
Bruckner was happy to accept the commission to write Helgolandand broke off work on his Ninth Symphonyin order to concentrate on a piece that he hoped would increase his standing in musical circles. It was written to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Vienna Male-Voice Choir, a celebration that the Emperor Franz Joseph I was to attend in person.
Its first performance on 8 October 1893 proved one of the great triumphs in Bruckner’s career. It is no longer possible to say with any certainty whether the decision to set the ballad by August Silberstein (1827-1900) was Bruckner’s own or whether that decision was taken by others.
The poem breathes the spirit of German nationalism that typified the educated Austrian bourgeoisie from the mid-19th century onwards and which singing societies – the Liedertafelnof the time – made it their duty to promulgate.
Ernst-Senff-Chor Berlin
Silberstein was numbered among the student dissidents of 1848 and driven into exile, settling in Vienna in 1856 and making his living as a journalist and occasional poet.
Silberstein’s ballade Helgolandis taken from an anthology, Mein Herz in Liedern, first published in 1868 and describes the threat posed to the island of Helgoland by a fleet of Roman warships. The Saxon islanders call on Heaven to help them, and assistance is duly provided in the form of a raging tempest. The pagan invasion is repulsed, and the Germanic people thank God for their deliverance.
The events depicted in the poem are purely fictional: the Romans never reached Helgoland, and the inhabitants of the island had not been converted to Christianity at the time of the Romans‘ wars of conquest.
Bruckner can have had no more time for such historical inaccuracies than for the contradictory claim that Catholicism is incompatible with national interests; in the apotheosis of Christianity in the hymn at the end of the ballad there seems like doubt that he grasped the underlying message.
The setting of the very last line, “O Herrgott, dich prieset frei Helgoland!” (O Lord God, free Helgoland glorifies thee), in which Bruckner modulates from G minor to the higher G major, is the most spacious in the whole work.
Berliner Philharmoniker
TRACK LISTING:
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – Symphony No. 1 in C Minor
Allegro- 12:49
Adagio – 13:36
Scherzo – 9:21
Finale, Bewegt, feurig – 14:00
Anton Bruckner (1824 – 1896) – “Helgoland”
“Helgoland” – 11:14
FINAL THOUGHT:
This is the first disc of Daniel Barenboim and the Berliner Philharmoniker’s massive (and pretty great) Bruckner Symphony Cycle. I have this disc as a one-off and not the entire box – so, going forward, it will be a mix and great (and not so great) performances of the Bruckner symphonies (and other works). I will just say this, I’m glad Anton B.kept writing after Symphony #1!
Even though he wrote over 200 works in his lifetime, there is only one reason we know the name Max Bruch today – his Violin Concerto in G Mino, Opus 26 – and for good reason, it is an f-ing masterpiece and this recording is glorious. And I’ll take an extra sentence for Edouard Lalo and his Symphonie Espagnole… my God, iconic, brilliant, love it – another reason we know him today as well.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES
No liner notes for this recording (it’s a CBS Masterworks recording from the vault and digitally remastered in the early 1990s) but here are some pics – and be sure to watch the performance videos further below.
Max BruchMax BruchEdouard LaloPnchas ZukermanPinchas ZukermanZubin Mehta
TRACK LISTING:
Max Bruch (1838-1920) – Violin Concerto in G Minor, Opus 26
I. Vorspiel – Allegro moderato / II. Adagio – 17:28
III. Finale – Allegro energico – 7:04
Édouard Lalo (1823-1892) – Symphonie Espagnole
I. Allegro non troppo – 7:47
II. Scherzando – 4:17
III. Allegro molto – 6:13
IV. Andante – 6:46
V. Rondo – Allegro – 7:01
FINAL THOUGHT:
This is just a great recording from the CBS Masterworks vault. Pinchas Zukerman has never sounded better and the LA Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta makes this a classic disc that I love revisiting every couple of years.
Recorded Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, February 1998
* World Premiere Recordings
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
To read the recording notes you would think this recording of Benjamin Britten early works was nothing more than ‘shite’ from a composer that was, eventually, going to be great – but these are really interesting pieces that deserve to be heard more.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES – Colin Matthews
Benjamin Britten – The Young Apollo
These recordings document an extraordinary period of innovation and experiment from Britten’s early years; two of the works predate his Opus 1, the Sinfonietta, and were never performed in his lifetime, and one, Young Apollo, was withdrawn shortly after its first performance.
Britten was remarkably prolific as a young composer, and many of the works from this time were put aside to await revision or completion as he rushed on to the next piece.
From 1928, when he was fourteen, Britten studied privately with Frank Bridge (1879-1941), before going to the Royal College of Music in the autumn of 1930.
He began writing the Two Portraits in August 1930 shortly after leaving school. One of his closest school friends had been David Layton, who is depicted in the first Portrait(Britten’smanuscript title is ‘Sketch for strings‘).
The second Portraithas the subtitle ‘E.B.B,’Britten’s initials, and it is clearly a self-portrait, with the viola (his own instrument) taking the lead role.
A third movement was planned but was not written; probably there was not time before Britten started his academic studies.
The first Portraitis a highly-chromatic and intense piece, rhapsodic in character, but introducing a strange waltz-like lilt shortly before the remarkable coda, in which solo strings bring back the opening of the work over a distance C major chord.
The second Portraitis strikingly different; a gentile and deeply-felt melody over a simple accompaniment.
During his first year at the Royal College, Britten wrote mainly vocal music, although he completed a D major String Quartet which he was to revise and publish in 1974.
From the autumn in 1931, he began to concentrate on instrumental and orchestral works (including two large-scale ballet scores), beginning work on the Double Concertoin May of 1932.
He interrupted it to compose the Sinfonietta(in no more than three weeks!), but completed the Concertoin sketch by the early autumn. Although the sketch is very detailed, he never made a full score, and seems to have made no attempt to get the work performed.
He showed it to his teacher at the College, John Ireland(1879-1962), who, as Britten recorded in his diary, was ‘pretty pleased’ with it. But it seems quite likely that his experience in rehearsing the newly completed Sinfoniettawith a student orchestra in the autumn of 1932 (‘I have never heard such an appalling row!’ read another diary entry) discouraged him from going on to complete the Double Concerto in score.
He was not, in fact, to hear any of his orchestral music until the first performance of Our Hunting Fathersfour years later.
The Double Concerto was first performed at the 1987 Aldeburgh Festival, with Kent Nagano conducting.
Since the composition of the Concertoand the Sinfoniettawas so intertwined, it is not perhaps surprising that they follow the same formal plan; a vigorous opening movement, and a Tarantella Finale.
The Concerto, although substantially the larger of the two pieces, is perhaps less adventurous in style (the first movement of the Sinfoniettais strongly influenced by Schoenberg’s 1906 Chamber Symphony). Clearly the highly virtuoso writing of the soloists parts led Britten towards more conservative orchestral textures.
However, the dance-like Finaleand sudden and unexpected return at the end to the music of the first movement are as original as anything he had written to date, and the work stands as an outstanding achievement for an eighteen-year-old.
The Sinfonietta’smore concentrated writing for its original ten players reveals a determined effort by Brittento write an ‘Opus 1,’which would make a mark on the musical world.
Although its first performance in 1933 received a mixed reception (for many years the critical establishment tried to dismiss Britten as ‘too clever by half’), his position as the leading British composer of his generation was established from that point on.
In 1936, he made what he called an ‘orchestral’ version with a part for second horn, and indications for string orchestra rather than solo players. But although it received a performance at the time, the only score in which Britten wrote this version was left in the USA after his return home in 1942, and did not reappear until the 1980s.
The annotated score is a particularly fascinating document as on the flyleaf are two poems of W.H,. Auden, written out for Britten in January 1937 by the poet just before his departure for the Spanish Civil War.
Auden’s departure for America in 1939 was the catalyst for Britten’s own move there in April of that year. His initial reception as composer and pianist in the USA and Canada was so enthusiastic that he contemplated a long stay, if not permanent residence.
By the summer he already had his first commission from the Canadian Broadcast Corporation in Toronto, for a ‘Fanfare’for piano and orchestra. Britten wrote in a letter that it is founded on the end of [Keats’ unfinished poem] Hyperion”From all his limbs celestial’... It is very bright and brilliant music – rather inspired by such sunshine as I’ve never seen before.’
Young Apollo was broadcast live by CBC in August 1939 with Britten as soloist; after a subsequent broadcast from New York in December, Britten withdrew the work, and it received no further performance until 1979. Yet he had given it an Opus number (16) and had seemed pleased with it.
Experimental in a wholly different way from his early music, Young Apollo is an extraordinary Fantasiacomposed entirely – with the exception of the piano’s scales in the cadenza near the beginning – in A major.
Britten seems almost to have anticipated minimalism with this work: did he think he had, for once, gone too far?
TRACK LISTING:
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) – Young Apollo, Opus 16 (1939)
Moderato – Allegro Molto – 7:06
Benjamin Britten – Double Concerto in B Minor (1932)
Allegro ma non troppo – 6:03
Rhapsody, Poco lento – 7:25
Allegro scherzando – Allegro non troppo – 8:03
Benjamin Britten – Two Portraits (1930)
No. 1 – ‘David Layton’ for string orchestra – Poco presto – 9:10
No. 2 – ‘E.B.B.’ for solo viola and string orchestra – Poco lento – 5:43
Benjamin Britten – Sinfonietta, Opus 1 (1932)
Poco presto ed. agitato – 4:16
Variations, andante lento – 6:16
Tarantella, Presto vivace – 4:04
FINAL THOUGHT:
Even today, Benjamin Britten is still being discovered and though it took 60 years (!) for a couple of these works to get a recording, it was worth the wait (Note, this was recorded in 1998.). This is a nice group of early Britten pieces and worth a listen. Here’s hoping BB gets the same kind of renaissance that Shostakovich received in the late 1990s which continues to this day! (Note, for good reason – he’s fucking awesome!)
There is not a lot of music written for two pianos – at least in the mainstream repertoire – but this recording is the cream of the crop. Highly recommended!
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES – Paul Griffiths
Challenge Of The Two-Piano Medium
From Debussy to Legeti and beyond, composers in the twentieth century have been attracted to the two-piano medium by the strict rhythm it imposes, by the complexity of keyboard texture and harmony it makes possible, and also for practical reasons.
Stravinsky and Bartok, for instance, were both in difficult times writing pieces they could perform with members of the family: Stravinsky’s younger son Soulima was emerging as a concert pianist; Bartok’s work was composed for himself and his second wife, Ditta Pasztory.
Stravinsky wrote the first movement of his concerto in 1931, but then the Duo concertant and “Persephone” intervened before the work was completed in 1934-35. In a lecture given before the first performance in Paris on November 21, 1935, the composer justified his title on the grounds that here “two pianos assume a concertante role in relation to one another,” and observed that their “concertante contest, by its very nature, requires a contrapuntal style.”
But the duel also results in a duet symphony, beginning with a concentrated sonata ‘Allegro in E minor’ around a more relaxed interlude in B-flat major. The eighteenth-century feel of that interlude is differently continued in the slow movement, which Stravinsky’s lecture relates to Classical nocturnes and cassations; the key is G major – with a central section in D flat.
Then the finale is in two parts, originally placed in reverse order: the definitive positioning means that the four variations precede their theme, which arrives in the prelude and is elaborated in the fugue. The variations are unstable in tonality, and their thematic distensions might suggest some early Shoenbergian influence, but the prelude and fugue are in D major, lifted to E major in the coda.
Bartok’s sonata, following in 1937, evidently pays its respects to Stravinsky, but to “Les noces” rather than to the concerto: the percussion complement is similar, with timpani and xylophone again married to the extreme ends of the keyboard, and there are similarities too of registration, of pulsed movement, and of block-style structuring.
However, Bartok combines this last feature with a driving forward sweep, especially in the first allegro. After the slow introduction it presents three themes, in different interpretations of 9/8, the first based on the emphatic rhythm of three crotchets followed by three quavers; the second a sophisticated Bulgarian dance with units of 4 + 2 +3, the third marked by initial leaping sixths and then iambic patterns.
The tightly developed recapitulation has the themes in the order 2 (in inversion), 3 (in fugue), 1 (as coda). After this comes a slow movement whose nocturnal imagery is not conventional but particular to Bartok, and a finale which bursts out of chromaticism into diatonic brightness, using a scale Bartok had found in Roumanian fold music (C, D, E, F sharp, G, A, B-flat, C). In form it is a sonata rondo, full of games with inversion, canon, and instrumentation.
The two Britten pieces, the Introduction and Rondo, alla burlesca and the Mazurka elegiaca, date from 1940 and 1941, respectively, the second being an elegy for Paderewski and a memory of his Chopin-playing.
TRACK LISTING:
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) – Introduction and Rondo all Burlesca, Op. 23 No. 1
Grave – 3:19
Allegro moderato, ma con spirito – Grave – Allegro con spirito – 6:02
Mazurka elegiaca, Op. 23 No. 2 – 7:12
Igor Stravinsky (1881-1972) – Concerto for 2 Pianos
Con moto – 6:31
Notturno (adagietto) – 5:24
Quattro variazioni – 4:29
Prelude e Fuga – 5:01
Bela Bartok (1881 – 1945) – Sonata for 2 Pianos and Percussion
Assai lento – Allegro molto – 15:09
Lento, Ma non troppo – 7:13
Allegro non troppo – 6:56
FINAL THOUGHT:
It’s hard to ever hear pieces like this performed live – so these recordings are golden and this one is one of the most golden. Dueling pianists have so much fun in these concerts just having each other to play off of – I’m surprised this music isn’t more popular – like the piano bars where it’s so much more fun with two pianos! Plus, man, that Bartok first movement with the JUMP SCARES 50 years before Texas Chainsaw Massacre is just awesome.
BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra – Conducted by Norman Del Mar (Two Poems For Orchestra, Gloriana)
BBC Symphony Orchestra – Conducted by Gennadi Rozhdestvensky (Passacaglia, Sinfonia Da Requiem, Cantus)
Recorded at various English venues from 1977-1981.
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ONE-SENTENCE REVIEW:
I know the star of this disc is Benjamin Britten, but I have to say I think the star here is Frank Bridge’s Tone Poem #1 – a real charmer – (I can hear you all screaming “But ‘Passacaglia!’) – maybe my head needed something really pleasant to listen to – and it did not disappoint.
ORIGINAL LINER NOTES – John Mayhew – 1995.
This record celebrates the music of Britten and his mentor and teacher Frank Bridge, and ends with a tribute to his memory.
Frank Bridge studied composition under Stanford and became an accomplished viola player and conductor; when Britten was 14, Bridge gave him private lessons in composition and became a valued friend.
Bridge’s Two Poems (after Richard Jefferies) are among his lesser-known works. The first is scored for a standard orchestra of double woodwind, four horns, timpani, harp and strings and is prefaced by these words from ‘The Open Air’: ‘Those thoughts and feelings which are not sharply defined, but have a haze of distance and beauty about them, are always the dearest.’
The second poem is for a larger orchestra which includes trumpets, tuba and percussion; at the head of the score are these words from ‘The Story of my Heart’: ‘How beautiful a delight to make the world joyous! The song should never be silent, the dance never still, the laugh should sound like water which runs for ever.’
Glorianawas written for the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and first staged at Covent Garden on 8th June 1953. Set in the last years of the reign of Elizabeth I, the opera is a skillful mix of Tudor idioms and rhythms and Britten’s own unmistakable style.
Some time after its first performance, Britten arranged an orchestral suite from the opera. First comes The Tournament, then Late Song whose optional tenor voice is usually taken by the oboe; the Courtly Dances are often heard independently, and the final movement is Gloriana moritura.
Peter Grimes was the first English opera to gain international footing and met with phenomenal success at its first performance at Sadler’s Wells in June 1945.
The Passacagliais played between scenes in the second act; the theme depicts Grimes’ fall from grace and is repeated by bass instruments against variations played by the solo viola, which represents the apprentice – innocent, silent and fearful.
Sinfonia da Requiem was written ‘in a terrible hurry’ in 1940 while Britten was still in America. He wrote that it was ‘just as anti-war as possible’ and dedicated it to the memory of his parents; friends and loved ones living under threat in wartime England must have been in his mind as well.
First comes a slow marching lament with three motifs. Britten described the central movement as ‘a form of Dance of Death;’ it has a contrasting central section. The final Requiem Aeternum suggests a waves on a remote seashore and recalls a theme from the Lacrymosamovement.
The music of Arvo Part has only recently become widely know outside his native Estonia. Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten is scored for string orchestra and a single bell, and is based on a descending minor scale played simultaneously at three different speeds at the start. This was its first UK performance.
Part greatly regretted not having met Britten, for whose music, he had a deep regard and respect. He wrote that ‘I had just discovered Britten for myself and begun to appreciate the purity of his music.’
Norman Del Mar
The English conductor, teacher and writer Norman del Mar specialized in late romantic and English repertoire. He was frequently seen at the BBC Promenade Concerts and was Principal Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from 1960-65.
He conducted all the major British orchestras and was well-known throughout Europe, especially in Scandinavia. His writing includes a study of Richard Strauss and various books on conducting and the orchestra. He was awarded the CBE in 1975 and died in 1994.
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky
Gennadi Rozhdestvensky was born in Moscow in 1931, the son of two famous musicians. In 1951, following studies at the Moscow Conservatoire, he worked at the Bolshoi, where he conducted operas by Britten and Prokofiev; he was principal conductor of the Bolshoi from 1964 to 1970. His London debut was with the visiting Bolshoi Ballet in “The Sleeping Beauty” at Covent Garden in 1956. He was appointed chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in 1978 before leaving for Vienna in 1981.
The late Romantic and contemporary repertoire is of great interest to him, and he conducted a wide range of English music while he was with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Having made over 500 commercial recordings, he continues to conduct worldwide, to promote contemporary music and to teach, compose and to play piano duets with his wife Viktoria Postnikova. (Post-notes note: He died in 2018.)
TRACK LISTING:
Frank Bridge – Two Poems For Orchestra
No. 1: Andante moderato e semplice – 7:45
No. 2: Allegro con brio – 4:14
Benjamin Britten – Gloriana
The Tournament – 3:53
The Lute Song – 4:24
The Country Dances – 9:20
Gloriana Moritura – 6:47
Benjamin Britten – Passacaglia from ‘Peter Grimes’ – Opus 33b
Passacaglia – (8:00)
Benjamin Britten – Sinfonia Da Requiem, Opus 20
Lacrymosa – 8:03
Dies irae – 4:52
Requiem aeternam – 5:05
Arvo Part – Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten
Cantus – 9:33
FINAL THOUGHT:
Discs like this one, curated “hits” attempting to pull together a theme (a tribute to Britten) are always kind of hard to write about. These are great recordings by really strong orchestras and legendary conductors. No complaints here – but also not much to say.
Emily Sachs – President – Manka Music Group (A division of Manka Bros. Studios – The World’s Largest Media Company
