Word: bruckner
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although The Song of the Earth consists of six songs translated from the Chinese, Mahler himself thought of it as his ninth symphony, refused to call it that only because of his fear that, like Beethoven and Bruckner, he would not live long beyond the ninth. The work is roughly a catalogue of the emotional ages of man, beginning in "life's sweet-scented morning," and concluding with the peaceful resignation of "The Farewell" ("My heart is still and waits for its deliverance"). Walter's intense performance last week wonderfully illuminated the score's leafy detail...
...slight man, Mahler wrote giant-sized, tempestuous music that echoes his countryman, Anton Bruckner; on first hearing, a Mahler piece usually sounds like far-out Brahms with Wagnerian delusions. To Mahler, the symphony was the ideal musical form; he composed no chamber music, no music for solo instruments, no small-scaled choral pieces; even his famous song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, calls for a full orchestra. Of the ten symphonies he wrote, only the First and Fourth are of normal length; the rest run on for as much as 90 minutes and employ vast orchestras. Symphony...
...other end of the scale, the Vienna Philharmonic performed Anton Bruckner's sprawling (80 minutes) Eighth Symphony, a superromantic exercise whose occasional eloquence and melodic beauty is drowned in the wearisome repetition of meaningless climaxes. The orchestra brightened things again with a fine, majestic performance of Schubert's Symphony No. 8 (The Unfinished) and a round of selections from various Strausses, including a Fledermaus overture that seemed to transform Carnegie Hall into a crystal-hung ballroom...
...Vienna Philharmonic: it plays too little modern music, rarely even gets around to the works of such eminent Viennese as Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern. But the men of the Vienna Philharmonic know what they like. Says Concertmaster Willy Boskovsky: "Our dominion, with our sound, is Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner and the classics; at this we are good. Perhaps American orchestras can play some of the newer music better...
Weill: Die Dreigroschenoper-The Threepenny Opera (Lotte Lenya, with supporting cast and orchestra conducted by Wilhelm Bruckner-Ruggeberg; Colum-bia, 2 LPs). Composer Weill's widow Lotte Lenya (TIME, Aug. n) went to Berlin last winter to handpick and train singers, direct a 30th anniversary recording of the complete score (including some lusty, gutsy sections never before performed) for the first time in Bertolt Brecht's inimitable original German. The result is by far the best recorded recreation of Kurt Weill's jazzy, bitterly ironic score, with Singer Lenya herself heading a first-rate cast. Every sardonic...