Word: bruckner
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...MUSIC CRITICISM A critic has to be very much for or very much against something. To be hated is the mark of a good critic. But every critic, I think, is proudest of his crusades. Above all, I crusaded for Anton Bruckner, who until 1952 was not recognized by anybody in New York except me. I feel that I am at least partially responsible for the revival of his music. Then, of course, I had a little crusade for Soprano Beverly Sills, about whom the New York Times never said a decent word...
...Will They Ever Finish Bruckner Boulevard? is a collection of her Sunday articles, which are sadly often hidden among gardening and coin and stamp collection news. She does not limit her criticism to New York City but attacks "urbicide" everywhere. Washington's Mussolini-classical Rayburn Building she calls "the biggest star-spangled architectural blunder of our time." Centers for the arts in New York, Washington, and Atlanta arouse her ire with their timid unwillingness to assert conscious modernity. Her criticism also strikes forcefully at the destruction of architecturally significant structures; she favors tasteful preservations with a social purpose, not reconstructed...
SZELL conducted a wide variety of composers, and a large number of works. He was weakest where Barbirolli was strongest, in the post-Romantics. Nonetheless, a recording which Columbia released after his death, of the Bruckner Eighth Symphony, is a truly fine work. Szell's genius was diffuse. He conducted so many composers well that it is hard to single out one set of performances for particular distinction. Besides being a great conductor, he was a great man. Although his control of the orchestra was tight and somewhat tyrannical, he was still well liked. Before he died, he conducted several...
...Bruckner was a romantic in the sense that he self-consciously implicated his faith and questionings in a musical tissue, but his romanticism is not the sturm and drang neurasthenic exacerbation of doubt and guilt which the term unfortunately suggests. Romanticism began as a vindication of the joy of a liberating mystical communion with nature rather than as a debilitating confusion of introspection with self-pity, or a lamentation on the evanescence of all things cherishable. It was, hopefully, a deeper recognition of mutability and then transcendence over corruptibility. The excellent program notes' suggestion that "Bruckner exalts the same romanticism...
...BRUCKNER found in his religious orthodoxy the same resonance of tradition and invitation to humanism, the same sustenance of spiritual and intellectual resolution, which he found in classical sonata form. His music proceeds with the deliberateness, comprehensiveness, mystical assurance, and formal clarity of the Mass. His symphonies are celebratory but never indulge in an easy rapture of tonal staleness or facile dramaturgy. Mahler learned much from Bruckner, primarily thematic linking of unprecedented subtlety among movements, the proliferation of material in the second thematic group, the immediate juxtaposition of radically differing elements (here Mahler extended Bruckner's simpler process of motto...