Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 in D Minor

Norrington has released a series of acclaimed Bruckner performances on CD. His fresh approach injects a healthy dose of “worldliness” into these works.

“Where Norrington is fearless is in Bruckner’s on-the-spot shifts of tempo or key.” Gramophone

Recorded 17th August 1960.

“Conducting is only a means to an end, never an end in itself. Making music is everything – and the less conducting draws attention to itself, the more beautiful the music will be and truly stir our hearts”.

Joseph Keilberth joined the Karlsruhe Staatstheater at the age of seventeen as a répétiteur. Ten years later he became general music director, the youngest at the time in Germany. On Furtwängler’s recommendation he was appointed chief conductor of the German Philharmonic Orchestra of Prague for the war years, moving to the Dresden State Opera (then in the Russian zone) in 1945. He remained in that position until 1950, by which time he had achieved a bizarre reunion with his Prague orchestra, now renamed the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra and newly resident in that town in western Germany.

Keilberth was a great Wagnerian conductor and recorded the first-ever stereo Ring – now available as a celebrated Testament release in a 14-CD set – SBT141412.

If both the Bruckner and the Schubert overture which opened this 1960 concert were Keilberth regulars, the Berg Violin Concerto was a newcomer to his repertoire that became a personal favourite; it was also his first-ever Berg score. He prepared it for the first time in December 1955 for a Hamburg State Opera concert with André Gertler. “It’s really coming together now”, he noted, “but much still sounds as if it’s wrong”. A little later he wrote to his son Thomas: “I’m pleased that the Berg Concerto now means more to you. For me, it’s the only 12-tone work that I like”. Then, by the 1965/66 season, Keilberth was replying to a questionnaire about his “Ten 20thcentury Masterworks of Music”. The Berg Concerto had become his No.2 choice, just ahead of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks but losing out to Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony.

Bruckner dedicated this symphony “To Dear God” but died before the work was finished. As a result the work has no final movement. The nobility of the music and the moving biographical circumstances, the tone of leave-taking and of turning away from the affairs of this world make every hearing of the work a special experience.