Happy Hump Day!

Here it is the last hump day of 2011 with everyone looking forward to the year end festivities culminating in the New Years Eve celebrations taking place on Saturday night.  But first we must get through the rest of the week, restless as we may be to begin the hardy partying set to begin this weekend.  To help you and I get over the midweek hump I have a somewhat lengthy yet beautiful piece of music by today's featured composer, Anton Bruckner.  "Anton Bruckner (4 September 1824 – 11 October 1896) was an Austrian composer known for his symphonies, masses, and motets. The first are considered emblematic of the final stage of Austro-German Romanticism because of their rich harmonic language, complex polyphony, and considerable length. Bruckner's compositions helped to define contemporary musical radicalism, owing to their dissonances, unprepared modulations, and roving harmonies."  The selection for today is Symphony Number 9 in D Minor (1894).  "The final accomplishment of Bruckner's life was to be his Symphony No. 9 in D minor which he started in August 1887, and which he dedicated "To God the Beloved." The first three movements were completed by the end of 1894, the Adagio alone taking 18 months to complete. Work was delayed by the composer's poor health and by his compulsion to revise his early symphonies, and by the time of his death in 1896 he had not finished the last movement. The first three movements remained unperformed until their premiere in Vienna (in Ferdinand Löwe's version) on 11 February 1903."  "In 1981, Nicola Samale and Giuseppe Mazzuca published their "Ricostruzione", the first soundly based and properly documented performing version of the Finale.  This pioneering achievement provided impetus for long overdue research on all the manuscript sources for the Ninth, which the director of the Bruckner Complete Edition, Leopold Nowak, was no longer able to undertake. Shortly before his death in 1991, he entrusted the task to the Australian musicologist and composer John A. Phillips. This extensive project on the Ninth comprises ten volumes. Phillips painstakingly ordered and systematised the scattered manuscripts. His detailed investigations of paper and handwriting resolved many details of the Finale's genesis. Moreover Phillips was thoroughly acquainted with the theoretical systems on which Bruckner founded his compositional technique. The definitive performing version of the Finale, published in 1991 by Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzuca owes its validity primarily to his insights.  The Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzuca score was first performed on 3rd December 1991 in Linz, Austria."  This performance of Symphony Number 9 is by the New Philharmonic Orchestra of Westphalia conducted by Johannes Wildner and runs 1 hour and 22 minutes.  However it is time well spent with this marvelous piece of music.  The video is followed by some 30 examples of Random Hotness who are magnificent and marvelous in their own right.  Thanks for the visit, see you again tomorrow.  Until next time as always, Enjoy!