Bruckner / Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart - Eliahu Inbal Conducts Bruckner - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

This 2 CD album issued by Naxos features both the 1877 version (with the scherzo coda) and the 1889 version. Also included is an intermediate 1876 revision of the second (adagio) movement that underwent further revision in 1877. Both versions are performed by orchestras today, but many prefer the 1877 version as being closer to what Bruckner really intended as opposed to what he thought would more likely be performed. (The original 1873 version was recorded by Georg Tintner and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. On these recordings, the 1877 version is almost 10 minutes longer than the 1889 version. That's partly the result of the Westphalian orchestra taking slightly faster tempos in performing the 1889 version, but mostly it represents substantial cuts to the 1877 version. The first movement is over 3 minutes shorter, with cuts mainly in the development and the coda but leaving the overall structure unchanged. The 1876 version of the adagio is in ABABA form, but the middle A section was cut in 1877, resulting in an ABA form with a long and repetitious B section. In 1889, the B section was reduced to eliminate some of the repetition. The only changes to the scherzo were the elimination of the coda and the addition of a few bars. The finale underwent the greatest amount of change. The 1877 version is in a sort of sonata-rondo form ABCAXABC-coda, where X is a development section and the coda is based on A and the first theme of the first movement, but the 1889 version shortens X, cuts out the A that follows it (thus resembling the finale of Brahms' First), drops most of the second C, and largely recomposes and shortens the coda. The A theme, a bold statement in the brass, is impressive!

The music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold has enjoyed a major renaissance over the last three decades. He is no longer the neglected, unknown master, the hidden Wunderkind of 20th century classical music. Korngold in a nutshell can be encapsulated thus Precocious teen and Wunderkind who composed too-beautiful music to be taken seriously at a time when modernism swept the cultural stage. When he died, Korngold was certain that he was and would remain a forgotten composer - at least in his homeland. As part of the greater trend of re-appreciation, the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, under Caspar Richter, made these recordings for ASV in the late 1990s and early 2000s (now available as 4-album box on Capriccio tag), pioneering efforts at the time and still much appreciated for the overview they give us of Korngold's œvre, beyond the handful of greatest hits available elsewhere.

Anton Bruckner's symphonies were a constant part of the repertoire for Mariss Jansons and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. The existing recordings - almost all the great Bruckner symphonies - are important documents of Jansons' deep understanding of the works, and the high musical quality of the recordings also testifies to the long Bruckner tradition at the BRSO. Jansons followed Bruckner's notes and markings with painstaking precision, and listening to a recording with the score reveals again and again how closely the conductor studied these works with the musicians of his orchestra. Bruckner's symphonies form the backbone of Late Romantic symphonic music. To a certain extent, Bruckner reinvented the symphony - something that not even Liszt or Wagner had dared to do in the wake of the groundbreaking masterpieces of Beethoven, which until then had been considered the culmination and conclusion of the genre. It was Bruckner and, somewhat later, Brahms who sought and found new methods of reviving the symphonic genre and developing it further. In this regard, Bruckner's approach was entirely new. From the outset, he relied on the sound of the large orchestra and, rather than mixing the individual groups of instruments, he tended to either separate them from each other or couple them together like organ registers (with which, as an organist, he was very familiar). Terraced dynamics, that is, the immediate juxtaposition of piano and forte without transition, was also something Bruckner derived from organ music. As a church musician, he had close contact with these and other elements of Baroque music, and they flowed into his symphonies. As far as dramaturgical development was concerned, he tended to favor Schubert; indeed, it was the organic continuation and alternating interconnection of themes Bruckner had learned from Schubert that also explains the un