Bruckner’s Third Symphony: Vindicated by Time

The premiere of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3 in D minor stands as one of music history’s most infamous disasters. The performance took place in Vienna on December 16, 1877. It was to have been conducted by Johann Herbeck, an Austrian maestro who had led the posthumous premiere of Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony in 1865. But Herbeck died suddenly, and Bruckner—an accomplished organist and choral director but an inexperienced orchestral conductor—decided to take …

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Barenboim on Bruckner

Conductor Daniel Barenboim had some interesting things to say, recently, about the music of Bruckner. (Why Bruckner Matters: A Listeners’ Guide With Daniel Barenboim). Here are a few excerpts: Bruckner is a very, how shall I say, special, specific world in the world of music. The musical idiom, the musical language, is post-Wagner, late 19th-century. The form however, is Classical, almost Baroque. And that already gives you the feeling that you are …

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Christopher Rouse’s First Symphony

From the first, haunting strands of its spine-chilling opening, Christopher Rouse’s Symphony No. 1 inhabits a world of darkness and terror. Its titanic forces rise out of, and then sink back into, an atmosphere of seemingly perpetual gloom. It shows us the strange beauty embodied in brooding darkness, hopelessness and despair, and concludes without delivering the kind of reassurance we would like. Completed in the summer of 1986, the work was written for the …

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