Word: bruckner
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...another seven months of unremittingly harsh and indifferent prosecutions of emulsified, vindictively pasteurized programs gleaming with lambent somnolence. Kirchner does not specialize in conducting twentieth century music, although he has performed Stravinsky stunningly, but responds with equal sensitivity to Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms. His programs of Bruckner, Varese, Handel, Stravinsky, and Beethoven exemplified this catholicism...
...Anton Bruckner's Overture in G minor proved to be a beautiful small piece. Bruckner belongs to that unhappy group of composers including Liszt. Schmidt, Reger, Vaughan Williams, and even Schoenberg, whose music is fashionably vilified without benefit of humane audition. The tedious and lamentable caricature of Bruckner most often encountered is of an amateurish, even childishly naive, rural organist who afflicted the world with eleven appallingly identical symphonies which are massive, repetitious, incoherent and only convulsively appealing. If he is given any credit at all, which rarely happens since people prefer summary condemnation to critical acceptance of monumental genius...
...personal nature of is musical thought, he composed as an act of prayer. He said, "All creation adorns itself continually for God." He was the sort of man who become despised because of his merciless ideals, but who relinquished all royalties on his works so that an edition of Bruckner could be published; a man who said just before his death that "poor Schoenberg will have no one left"; a man who spent all of his precious years perfecting his interoperations of Tristan, Fidelio, and The Magic Flute; a man who read Kant aloud to his wife during Children...
...made his conducting reputation on no more than half a dozen works-notably Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, to which he brings astonishing rhythmic control and a primitive passion for the work's savage shafts of power. He does not much care for Brahms, Tchaikovsky, or Bruckner, but his conducting of Beethoven, Mozart and Haydn has been superb in its structural logic. During his Philharmonic stay, he attracted a younger, more intellectual audience than usual. Even the hard-to-please orchestra was impressed with his mentality and uncanny ear. "He's probably got the greatest musical...
...Pianist Van Cliburn as soloist are the best of the lot. But the Chopin F-minor Concerto with Artur Rubinstein is heavy and graceless, and Tchaikovsky's Pathetique Symphony lacks the bite and immediacy of a nine-year-old version that Columbia re-engineered and rereleased last year. Bruckner's Seventh Symphony has a glossiness that does not suit the music at all. Mozart's Jupiter and Schubert's Unfinished symphonies are the most unresonant...