Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin & Vladimir Jurowski - Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 (2024)

×

Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin & Vladimir Jurowski - Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 (2024)

Close

Anton Bruckner had to wait an age before bagging his first and greatest success. The Austrian composer’s Seventh Symphony, first performed in Leipzig in 1884 shortly after his sixtieth birthday, proved an immediate hit. Vladimir Jurowski’s visionary interpretation of the work with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, recorded live at the Berlin Philharmonie, stands as the utterly compelling outcome of the conductor’s profound study and long experience of performing Bruckner’s music. He’s backed to the hilt by superlative playing, remarkable for its intense focus, lyrical warmth, and jaw-dropping beauty.

Although the score escaped the byzantine process of revision that Bruckner habitually applied to his works, its first edition included changes made after the symphony’s premiere. Jurowski decided to use the subsequent edition made by Robert Haas in the 1940s, to which he added elements from later scholarly editions, the cymbal crash and percussion at the climax of the work’s slow movement among them.

The business of Bruckner editions, he tells Apple Music Classical, sets a minefield for conductors. “And it’s also a minefield, particularly with this symphony, to establish your own handwriting in interpreting it or not over-interpreting it, allowing the music to speak with its own voice. What helps in my relationship with Bruckner is the fact that I’ve been marching along a self-chosen route by performing his symphonies chronologically, doing them version by version, in the order in which they were written.”