The Bruckner cycle is completed - just in time for Anton Bruckner's 196th birthday. All recordings of the Bruckner cycle were made between 2017 and 2019 in the monastery of St. Florian, the composer's final resting place.
Following the release of the individual albums, the orchestra’s own MPHIL label is now releasing a CD box set of the complete cycle. In addition to the live recordings from 2017 (Symphonies No. 1, 3, and 4), 2018 (Symphonies No. 2, 8, and 9), and 2019 (Symphonies No. 5, 6, and 7), the CD box set contains musicological background texts on each symphony in German and English.
Having started this past September 2017, in the Monastery of St. Florian fascinating a setting with unique historical significance in this context, the Munich Philharmonic and Valery Gergiev present the most spectacular and ambitious cycle of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies. The Munich Philharmonic proudly commence their St. Florian Live Recordings Series with the release of his First Symphony, recorded in September 2017.
Bruckner’s Second Symphony already reveals all the hallmarks of the fully developed »Bruckner style«: powerful agglomerations of sound in its outer movements, the »atmosphere of a moonlit night« in its slow movement and a rustic dance scene in its Scherzo. This Scherzo is arguably the reason why this work is also known as Bruckner’s »Upper Austrian Symphony«.
All concerts of our Bruckner Symphony cycle in the basilica of the Monastery of St. Florian have been recorded in audio and video. The box was published by »Arthaus Musik« in cooperation with »Telmondis« on 6 November, 2020. It includes the entire cycle on DVD and Blue-ray, the new filmed documentary »Anton Bruckner – The Making of a Giant«, Anton Bruckner’s handwritten CV as Facsimile and two hardcover books in German and English.
Having started in September 2017 the Munich Philharmonic and Valery Gergiev present the most spectacular and ambitious cycle of Anton Bruckner’s symphonies. The second release in this series is Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony, called »Wagner-Symphony«.
Bruckner himself used the epithet »Romantic« to describe his Fourth Symphony. The experience of the many-faceted manifestations of nature is at the very heart of the work. Only when he was revising his composition did Bruckner add the famous »Hunt Scherzo« in third position.
The Seventh Symphony marked Bruckner’s international breakthrough: the Leipzig premiere on 30 December 1884 was followed by an acclaimed performance in Munich on 10 March 1885 that ushered in the work’s triumphal conquest of concert halls all over the world. Bruckner dedicated the Adagio, the symphony’s second movement, to the memory of Richard Wagner, of whose death he learned while he was working on the symphony.
Bruckner never heard a performance of his Fifth Symphony in its orchestral guise. By the time the work was premiered in Graz, he was already too ill to attend. It is regarded as one of his most challenging and at the same time most impressive creations, not least on account of its contrapuntal and powerful final movement.
The Sixth is a special case among Bruckner’s symphonies. Once held in lesser regard, it is now seen as just as multilayered and profound a masterpiece as his other contributions to the medium. The opening does not grope its way forward in a typically tentative Brucknerian manner by allowing its thematic structures to emerge only gradually; instead, the music is »there« from the outset.
In writing his Eight Symphony, Bruckner hoped to surpass all that he had previously achieved in the field of symphony and to do so, moreover not only in terms of the dimensions of the individual movements, but also in the intensity of his expression - he was all the more disappointed, then, when his contemporaries initially rejected the work. He revised the symphony and it was in this reworked version that it enjoyed a triumphant premiere in 1892, proving that the world of music was finally ready to confront the strenuous demands placed upon it by such a large-scale symphony.
In seiner 9. und letzten Symphonie zog Anton Bruckner mit seinem unerschütterlichen Glauben Bilanz seines Lebens. Vollenden konnte er die Symphonie nicht; er starb während der Ausarbeitung des Finales. Die vorliegenden drei Sätze führen in eine Welt des Suchens und Ringens, das Scherzo ist geprägt von dämonischem Schrecken und das Adagio führt in eine nach Kämpfen und Zweifeln errungene Klangwelt friedlichen Abschieds.
