Bruckner's Abbey

[Belle]

@Conrad Veidt fan is the poster that recommended that amazing K. Petrenko Tchaikovsky 6 that I now love! He posts something extraordinary, refuses to elaborate, and then leaves.

I was that poster but changed my username to Belle after having trouble signing in after a hiatus.  And my pronouns are 'she' and 'her'!!

[Cato]

From Professor John Phillips, whose completion of the Finale of the Ninth Symphony is receiving more performances from major conductors:

"Early this year (i.e. 2025) I also introduced a number of tiny amendments to the orchestration recommended by Riccardo Chailly, who had planned to conduct the Ninth with Finale six times in all in 2025, three times with the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and three time at La Scala in Milan, but, forced to rest after a health scare, had Manfred Honeck take over his performances in Amsterdam (the first time the Concertgebouw had ever done the Finale) and postponed his Milan performances to November 2026. He did so, he told me, because his personal commitment to the revised Finale was so great.

Despite the postponement of his Milan performances, 2025 still saw eight performances of the Finale world-wide, the most ever in one year, along with the first CD release (by the Hallé), perhaps an indication that the work may finally be beginning to take off. Let's see. For  2026 we already have three performances scheduled in Spain in January and Chailly's three postponed performances in Milan in November.

My other news regarding the Finale is also very welcome: my publisher, Alexander Hermann Verlag, Vienna, has asked if he would like to take over management of the Finale and hire of the parts, which means that the orchestral parts are now lodged with Schott, the largest international classical music distributor. Almost the same month I received word from the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna, who requested a 400,000 word monograph on the Bruckner Ninth from me. So the Finale will finally get its forever home and my PhD thesis of 2001 will finally get its long-overdue revision and publication."

[Cato]

From Professor John Phillips, whose completion of the Finale of the Ninth Symphony is receiving more performances from major conductors:

I should mention that Professor Phillips, who teaches in Australia, suffered a stroke, perhaps 2 years ago, so it is good to know that he has recovered at least somewhat!

Here is the Halle' Orchestra performance of the completed Finale mentioned above: I think I like it better than Inbal's !

[Cato]

This notice arrived: those of you on the East Coast might consider this!

https://www.brucknerjournal.com/conferences/tbjconference

"...The Bruckner Journal is pleased to announce that the next Readers Conference will take place at Yale University in cooperation with the School of Music and Prof. Paul Hawkshaw, co-editor of the New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition, and co-sponsored by the Bruckner Society of America.


This is a wonderful opportunity for Brucknerians to meet together in pleasant surroundings, hear papers from leading scholars in the field and from other Bruckner enthusiasts. As with the Journal itself, non-academic music lovers need not be intimidated and can be sure they will find a friendly welcome and much to enjoy, to think about and discuss.


In addition to presentations and informal gatherings, this Conference will also feature a

concert on 2 April by the Yale Philharmonia with Peter Oundjian performing Mahler's Sixth Symphony!

Sure, let's play Mahler's Sixth at a Bruckner conference!      

[springrite]

This notice arrived: those of you on the East Coast might consider this!

https://www.brucknerjournal.com/conferences/tbjconference


Sure, let's play Mahler's Sixth at a Bruckner conference!      

The last movement itself should do the job.

[Cato]

The last movement itself should do the job.

   That is an emotionally exhausting work!


This morning...

Look for the other movements on the side of the YouTube page!

[calyptorhynchus]

As many of you will know I am of the opinion that Bruckner's revisions were mainly an aberration and that apart from Nos 4 & 8 the earliest versions of the symphonies are to be preferred.
I also have a poor opinion of Bruckner's so-called friends who seem to have done nothing to relieve his anxieties and encouraged him to waste his time in his later years revising earlier symphonies.
How amusing then to find that the surname of the brothers Schalk, the principals of this circle of false-friends, means 'mischief' in German!

[André]

As many of you will know I am of the opinion that Bruckner's revisions were mainly an aberration and that apart from Nos 4 & 8 the earliest versions of the symphonies are to be preferred.
I also have a poor opinion of Bruckner's so-called friends who seem to have done nothing to relieve his anxieties and encouraged him to waste his time in his later years revising earlier symphonies.
How amusing then to find that the surname of the brothers Schalk, the principals of this circle of false-friends, means 'mischief' in German!

The two most wholesale revisions are those of the 4th and 8th, so we're good here.

Apart from that, the most drastic revisions affect the first published symphonies (1, 2, 3). Schalk's reworking of the 5th had nothing to do with Bruckner, it was their own, unauthorized score. As for 6, 7 and 9, whatever differences are quite minimal. The cymbal crash in the 7th's Adagio is seen by some as a cheap effect, but many listeners love it. More important to my ears is the revision to the timpani part at that same point.

I agree that no 1 is definitely better heard in the original 'Linz' version, but the case of nos 2 and 3 is not so clear - at least not for me. No 2 definitely benefited from Bruckner's revisions, with the proviso that the horn solo is chosen for the coda of the slow movement (the clarinet alternative was written because horn players were scared to play an exposed passage after almost 40 minutes of dense brass writing).

As for the 3rd, I like that original version, but the revised 1873 is definitely an improvement. After that Bruckner made silly editorial decisions, adding a bee-swarm coda to the scherzo and chopping 1/4 of the finale.