Klaus Tennstedt's Live Performance of Bruckner's 8th Symphony

[Spitz]

About 20 years ago at Boston Symphony Hall, I heard the BSO under the direction of Klaus Tennstedt play Bruckner's 8th Symphony. I have always been extremely fond of this work, especially the luxuriously seductive slow movement. Well, Tennstedt milked that movement to the utmost--the surges of emotion got more intensely beatific until by the end I was raised to a higher level of consciousness, an altered state close to rapture. While I was wrapped up in my delirium, my wife, as she later told me, was fast asleep for the whole last half of the symphony! She missed something extraordinary, that's for sure, but I don't think that she lost any sleep over it.

[Coopmv]

Tennstedt was well known for his interpretation of Mahler's works ...

[Lethevich]

Tennstedt was very impressive in the 8th - a broadcast with the BSO in 1974 has been going around the net for a while which was simply white hot.