Saturday at the Symphony

Welcome to the Weekend and your Saturday at the Symphony.  I have a great lineup for your today featuring the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and the Symphonic stylings of Austrian Composer Anton Bruckner.  In February of 1979, Sergiu Celibidache conducted his first concert series with the Munich Philharmonic and in June of the same year he was appointed General Music Director. Concert tours took him and the orchestra through many European countries as well as to South America and Asia. The legendary Bruckner concerts made a major contribution to the orchestra’s international standing, and during the Celibidache era the orchestra was repeatedly invited to accompany the Federal Government or the Federal President as musical ambassadors.  While touring Japan in 1990, The Munich Philharmonic gave a series of concerts at Suntory Hall in Tokyo.  Today's Symphony Selection comes from this series of concerts.

Bruckner's symphonies are all in four movements (though he was unable to complete the finale of the Ninth), starting with a modified sonata allegro form, a slow movement in ABA’B’A’’ form (except in the Study Symphony, the First and the Sixth), a scherzo in 3/4 time, and a modified sonata allegro form finale. (In the Eighth, Ninth, and the first version of the Second, the slow movements and scherzo are reversed. The revised version of the Fourth features a scherzo – the "Hunt scherzo" – in which the outer sections are in 2/4 meter, not the customary 3/4.) There is a marked preference for the use of consistent four-bar periods. They are scored for a fairly standard orchestra of woodwinds in pairs, four horns, two or three trumpets, three trombones, tuba (from the second version of the Fourth), timpani and strings. The later symphonies increase this complement, but not by much. Notable is the use of Wagner tubas in his last three symphonies. Only the Eighth has harp, and percussion besides timpani (though legend has it the Seventh is supposed to have a cymbal clash at the exact moment Wagner died). With the exception of Symphony No. 4, none of Bruckner's symphonies have subtitles, and most of their nicknames did not originate with the composer. Trademarks of Bruckner's works are powerful codas and grand finales, as well as the frequent use of unison passages and orchestral tutti. His style of orchestral writing was criticized by his Viennese contemporaries, but by the middle of the twentieth century musicologists recognized that Bruckner's orchestration was modeled after the sound of his primary instrument, the pipe organ i.e. alternating between two groups of instruments, as when changing from one manual of the organ to another.

Nicholas Temperley writes in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980) that Bruckner:

alone succeeded in creating a new school of symphonic writing.... Some have classified him as a conservative, some as a radical. Really he was neither, or alternatively was a fusion of both.... [H]is music, though Wagnerian in its orchestration and in its huge rising and falling periods, patently has its roots in older styles. Bruckner took Beethoven's Ninth Symphony as his starting-point.... The introduction to the first movement, beginning mysteriously and climbing slowly with fragments of the first theme to the gigantic full statement of that theme, was taken over by Bruckner; so was the awe-inspiring coda of the first movement. The scherzo and slow movement, with their alternation of melodies, are models for Bruckner's spacious middle movements, while the finale with a grand culminating hymn is a feature of almost every Bruckner symphony.^[27]

Bruckner is the first composer since Schubert about whom it is possible to make such generalizations. His symphonies deliberately followed a pattern, each one building on the achievements of its predecessors.... His melodic and harmonic style changed little, and it had as much of Schubert in it as of Wagner.... His technique in the development and transformation of themes, learnt from Beethoven, Liszt and Wagner, was unsurpassed, and he was almost the equal of Brahms in the art of melodic variation.^[28]

Cooke adds, also in the New Grove,

Despite its general debt to Beethoven and Wagner, the "Bruckner Symphony" is a unique conception, not only because of the individuality of its spirit and its materials, but even more because of the absolute originality of its formal processes. At first, these processes seemed so strange and unprecedented that they were taken as evidence of sheer incompetence.... Now it is recognized that Bruckner's unorthodox structural methods were inevitable.... Bruckner created a new and monumental type of symphonic organism, which abjured the tense, dynamic continuity of Beethoven, and the broad, fluid continuity of Wagner, in order to express something profoundly different from either composer, something elemental and metaphysical.^[29]

In a concert review, Bernard Holland described parts of the first movements of Bruckner's sixth and seventh symphonies as follows: "There is the same slow, broad introduction, the drawn-out climaxes that grow, pull back and then grow some more – a sort of musical coitus interruptus."^[30]

In the 2001 Second Edition of the New Grove, Mark Evan Bonds called the Bruckner symphonies "monumental in scope and design, combining lyricism with an inherently polyphonic design.... Bruckner favored an approach to large-scale form that relied more on large-scale thematic and harmonic juxtaposition. Over the course of his output, one senses an ever-increasing interest in cyclic integration that culminates in his masterpiece, the Symphony No. 8 in C minor, a work whose final page integrates the main themes of all four movements simultaneously."^[31].  Today's featured work is Bruckner's Symphony Number 8 in C minor which illustrates perfectly the sweep and grandeur so typical of Bruckner's works captured live with Celibidache at the podium on October 2, 1990.  You may also hear Celibidache and the Munich Philharmonic's October 18 performance of Bruckner's Symphony Number 7 in E Minor over on my tumblr.

 While mesmerized by the symphonic styling of Bruckner, I have an exquisite photographic portrait collection of lithesome lads au natural in this week's edition of Naked or Nearly So on display below the video.  These portraits evoke their own imaginings of the heart, soul and spirit within each subject from youthful winsomeness to the more mature and sensual.  Additional inspiration can be found in the Hottie of the Day! over on my tumblr.  Thanks for sharing a part over on my tumblr.  Have a fabulous weekend and join me again on Monday for another week of Music, Men & More!  Until next time as always, Enjoy!

Author's note: this post features liberal use of information found on Anton Bruckner's Wikipedia page and the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra's website.