Anton Bruckner

[Ash Armstrong]

Chris2210

Early tomorrow (Friday) morning so best recorded or on catch -up.
Sky Arts 07.40 - 09.00
80mins.

[Chris2210]

You know I didn’t think we had Sky Arts, but it’s in our Virgin Media package, so that’s set to record.

Much appreciated - you’ve remembered right I’m a big Bruckner fan. Quite a strange character by all accounts, but his symphonies are literally awesome. He was apparently much celebrated as an exponent of the pipe organ, but strangely he didn’t leave much in terms of composition for that instrument.

[Oldie on the Goldie]

HIs 8th symphony is a masterpiece. I don't know why so many classical music fans are down on Bruckner.

[Ash Armstrong]

It took me a while to find a way into his soundworld, those huge cathedralic slabs of sound, but he's among my go-to composers now.

[Chris2210]

Yeah - it clicked for me when I really listened to the scherzo from Symphony 8 on Classic CD [remember that? I used to be a subscriber]. That's always struck me as like a carillon, and it is as it turns out quintessential Bruckner - as you say, huge slabs of sound repeated almost obsessively with massive force.

Bruckner's reputation in the Anglosphere seems to have grown a lot in the last fifty years. But I think there are lots of reasons he was dismissed - the differing versions, the lengths with constantly repeated thematic material and the fact he more or less 'composed the same symphony 10 times' [as it's often said]. There's also the fact that my favourite composer [Brahms] said the idea of Bruckner as a symphonist was preposterous - perhaps a casualty of his war with Wagner. I never listen to the first three symphonies [starting at #0] but you can look at the whole run as constant refinement and restatement of one constant preoccupation. The eighth is probably the ultimate expression, but the ninth in spite of it being 'unfinished' doesn't seem to leave itself unresolved over the three movements [which are longer than most completed symphonies anyway].

Bleeding over to that other conversation - if 'heavy' music is loud, powerful, repeated riffs, Bruckner makes Black Sabbath sound like Simon and Garfunkel!

[Oldie on the Goldie]

Absolutely right - that second movement is truly "heavy". The third movement is such a contrast, sometimes called the "Ascent to Heaven". Hypnotic and transcendental.