Bruckner's Abbey

Started by Lilas Pastia, April 06, 2007, 07:15:30 AM

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VonStupp

Quote from: André on August 01, 2021, 02:23:51 PM
Well, count me in ! They are extremely refreshing in their boldness and rhythmic drive.

Yes, and you get that in spades with Solti.
"All the good music has already been written by people with wigs and stuff."

vandermolen

"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

TheGSMoeller

Quote from: vandermolen on August 19, 2021, 01:27:18 AM
Good review of new Chandos recording of the 6th Symphony
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2021/Aug/Bruckner-sy6-CHAN20221.htm

Nice! I received this disc a few weeks ago and agree, it's a very good recording.

vandermolen

Quote from: TheGSMoeller on August 19, 2021, 12:08:42 PM
Nice! I received this disc a few weeks ago and agree, it's a very good recording.
Good to know!
:)
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

Cato

Apparently Herbert Blomstedt (age 94) conducted Bruckner's Symphony #5 with the Berlin Philharmonic this weekend!

Of interest therefore:

https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/blomstedt-interview-bruckner/?fbclid=IwAR304DbBFPG2UTxZmzrmiNeAIb-dmJ5LphbGVBRfawRqul7e7diEO6XaCoY
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

calyptorhynchus

Unfortunately it's happened  :(

After trying hard not to get pernickety about the cymbals and triangle in the Adagio of the 7th I have become so. It started with Rosbaud's recording and since then I have found his recording of the Adagio without percussion much more powerful and sustained in its momentum than other recordings which do include the crash and tingles.

All the other recordings I have have the percussion. What are some modern recordings that omit them?
'Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth.' Robert Burton

MusicTurner

#3606
Quote from: Cato on October 03, 2021, 04:52:09 PM
Apparently Herbert Blomstedt (age 94) conducted Bruckner's Symphony #5 with the Berlin Philharmonic this weekend!

Of interest therefore:

https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/blomstedt-interview-bruckner/?fbclid=IwAR304DbBFPG2UTxZmzrmiNeAIb-dmJ5LphbGVBRfawRqul7e7diEO6XaCoY

That's surely a very impressive level of activity for that age. He'll be setting records, if he isn't already doing it ... I think Stokowski was 92 at his last concert in 1974. BTW, Wiki has a list of centenarian musicians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_centenarians_(musicians,_composers_and_music_patrons)

Jo498

Quote from: calyptorhynchus on October 09, 2021, 10:49:14 PM
After trying hard not to get pernickety about the cymbals and triangle in the Adagio of the 7th I have become so. It started with Rosbaud's recording and since then I have found his recording of the Adagio without percussion much more powerful and sustained in its momentum than other recordings which do include the crash and tingles.

All the other recordings I have have the percussion. What are some modern recordings that omit them?
There must be a list somewhere on the internet for this... ;)
I never much cared either way (it's one of the handful of things where I cannot really understand why everyone puts so much importance on them - like the hammer blows in Mahler or the octave glissandi in the Waldstein sonata), so I don't remember but I suspect that Gielen might be following Rosbaud here.
Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre.
- Blaise Pascal

Maestro267

If Bruckner deployed percussion regularly it wouldn't be such a problem.

André

Quote from: calyptorhynchus on October 09, 2021, 10:49:14 PM
Unfortunately it's happened  :(

After trying hard not to get pernickety about the cymbals and triangle in the Adagio of the 7th I have become so. It started with Rosbaud's recording and since then I have found his recording of the Adagio without percussion much more powerful and sustained in its momentum than other recordings which do include the crash and tingles.

All the other recordings I have have the percussion. What are some modern recordings that omit them?




From Berky's web site, this page gives the list of all available versions of the 7th. At the beginning it states that
Quote
There is only one version of the Symphony No. 7, but there are differences between the editions prepared by Robert Haas and Leopold Nowak. The primary difference is the inclusion of the cymbals in the Adagio in the Nowak edition

So, Nowak = cymbals, Haas = timpani only.

https://www.abruckner.com/discography1/symphonyno7inemajo/


Scrolling down will reveal all extant recordings by edition(Haas-no-cymbals first, Nowak-cum-cymbals second).

Voilà !

vandermolen

Currently enjoying this (No.5)

I first came across Rosbaud's Bruckner when, as a teenager, I bought his Vox/Turnabout LP of Symphony No.7 in my early days of discovering classical music:
"Courage is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm" (Churchill).

'The test of a work of art is, in the end, our affection for it, not our ability to explain why it is good' (Stanley Kubrick).

calyptorhynchus

Quote from: André on October 10, 2021, 09:18:44 AM



From Berky's web site, this page gives the list of all available versions of the 7th. At the beginning it states that
So, Nowak = cymbals, Haas = timpani only.

https://www.abruckner.com/discography1/symphonyno7inemajo/


Scrolling down will reveal all extant recordings by edition(Haas-no-cymbals first, Nowak-cum-cymbals second).

Voilà !

Ah, thanks, so apart from Rosbaud the main ones are Asahina, Karajan, Thielemann and Wand.
'Many men are melancholy by hearing music, but it is a pleasing melancholy that it causeth.' Robert Burton

André

October 11th, 2021 is the 125th anniversary of Bruckner's death. This is his resting place in St Florian Abbey:



Note the crypt with thousands of craniums in the background...

Daverz

Quote from: vandermolen on October 10, 2021, 12:22:36 PM
Currently enjoying this (No.5)

I first came across Rosbaud's Bruckner when, as a teenager, I bought his Vox/Turnabout LP of Symphony No.7 in my early days of discovering classical music:


Note that the 7 in the SWR box is from a mono tape.  The same performance was also recorded in true stereo (and much better sound than the Vox CD).  I have it in this box:



https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001E1DHFO/

 

Cato

Wow, Bob!  WOW!

Concerning the climax in the Adagio of the Seventh Symphony, and many other things...

"Many of the apparent weaknesses in Bruckner's music - his long - windedness, his inconsequentiality, his naive literalism - prove to be motes in our eye rather than in his ear. We listen with irrelevant preconceptions; and this is not entirely our fault because it is not easy to hear Bruckner's scores as he wrote them.

So great was his humility that he allowed well-meaning friends to rewrite and rescore his works in order to make them more acceptable to conventional notions of symphonic style. His themes-except perhaps in his scherzos-are spacious and not time-obsessed; and although the first movement of his Fifth is undeniably shorter without its recapitulation, it does not make better sense. Even if one never comes to recognize the logic in Bruckner's vast structures, there are moments when one wonders, listening to these last three adagios, whether since the last works of Beethoven music has reached this point again.

The climax of the Adagio to the Seventh - and therefore of the whole work - is a conflictless paean of bells on a C major triad, which grows out of softly upsurging scales on the violins. It is naive if you like. Yet it is also an incarnation of Glory, and only a man who had seen this vision could have written the elegy with which the movement then concludes; funereal music, inspired by the death of Wagner, in which there is regret, but no shadow of fear. In his very innocence, Bruckner seems in such moments to belong to a nobler race than our own. It is no more than a sober statement of fact to say that we shall never look upon his like again."
                   

  --Wilfred Mellers, "The Sonata Principle"
                         p. 693, Barrie and Jenkins,London 1988


"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

Cato

Quote from: Cato on October 18, 2021, 05:50:57 PM


The climax of the Adagio to the Seventh - and therefore of the whole work - is a conflictless paean of bells on a C major triad, which grows out of softly upsurging scales on the violins. It is naive if you like. Yet it is also an incarnation of Glory, and only a man who had seen this vision could have written the elegy with which the movement then concludes; funereal music, inspired by the death of Wagner, in which there is regret, but no shadow of fear. In his very innocence, Bruckner seems in such moments to belong to a nobler race than our own. It is no more than a sober statement of fact to say that we shall never look upon his like again."
                   

  --Wilfred Mellers, "The Sonata Principle"
                         p. 693, Barrie and Jenkins,London 1988[/size][/font]

A more melancholy statement would be difficult to find.  Rather, I believe that such people still do persist in the human race, but that their creativity, if it is not killed in its infancy, is drowned out by the cacophony of kulcheral mediocrity (and of things much worse than the mediocre ones) being lionized as genius today.

I would like to believe that a 21st-century Bruckner or Beethoven or (Insert Name Here) can still be found, but one must search for them much more diligently and with more difficulty than ever before to discover them.
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

Cato

What are your thoughts on the Haitink set of Bruckner symphonies?

By a certain James Leonard:

Quote

Does anyone outside of the Benelux countries remember the Haitink/ Concertgebouw/Bruckner cycle? With competition from the more glamorous Karajan/Berlin cycle and the more muscular Solti/Chicago cycle, not to mention the more spiritual Jochum/Bavarian/Berlin cycle, the more straightforward Haitink/Concertgebouw cycle probably doesn't stick in the memories of most international listeners. And yet there are many good reasons to prefer the Haitink/Concertgebouw cycle. For one thing, there's Haitink. A consummate professional with less ego and arguably more integrity than Karajan and more sincerity than Solti, Haitink was more than willing to let Bruckner's symphonies unfold in their own good time....




See:

https://www.allmusic.com/album/bruckner-the-symphonies-mw0001840021
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

Roasted Swan

I must admit I do enjoy Bruckner red in tooth and claw but that said The Haitink/Concertgebouw cycle is an absolute prime example of how to let the music unfold with a sure sense of musical direction and utter control.  Very fine indeed.

Cato

Quote from: Roasted Swan on October 22, 2021, 03:37:08 AM
I must admit I do enjoy Bruckner red in tooth and claw but that said The Haitink/Concertgebouw cycle is an absolute prime example of how to let the music unfold with a sure sense of musical direction and utter control.  Very fine indeed.

Many thanks for the comment...and your picture of the "merry" people waiting for their excursion is a classic!  ;)

I wonder how Haitink would fare in a comparison with Carl Schuricht, who was also known for a straight-forward approach in his recordings of the symphonies.
"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

- Brian Aherne introducing Rosalind Russell in  My Sister Eileen (1942)

Mirror Image

Quote from: Roasted Swan on October 22, 2021, 03:37:08 AM
I must admit I do enjoy Bruckner red in tooth and claw but that said The Haitink/Concertgebouw cycle is an absolute prime example of how to let the music unfold with a sure sense of musical direction and utter control.  Very fine indeed.

Absolutely. The Haitink/RCO cycle is one of the great ones, but he remained a master Brucknerian throughout his long and distinguished career. His 6th with the Staatskapelle Dresden on Profil is stunning.