Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E Major

The CDs in this Premium Composers series feature critically acclaimed performances at a bargain price. Here we have two of Bruckner’s mightiest scores. Kurt Sanderling delivers one of the best recordings of Symphony No.7 in the catalogue. Giulini conducts Symphony No.9 and is one of this work’s unquestioned masters.

Continuing their Bruckner cycle with Janowski and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, here is Symphony No.7. With Symphony No.8 PTC5196371 as the ‘benchmark recording’ on Radio 3’s Building a Library, this volume will be eagerly awaited.

This symphony was premiered very successfully in Leipzig and was spared all the reworkings of many of Bruckner's symphonies. A later performance in Munich aroused a wave of enthusiasm which reached Vienna, where Richter conducted the work.

The 1958 concert at which this recording was made began with a Klemperer favourite, Mozart’s A major Symphony, K201. (A performance of this in Italy had been significant in persuading Legge to offer the conductor a major recording contract with EMI in London; unfortunately the tape of the Klemperer/VSO performance has been lost.) The Bruckner Seventh Symphony followed after the interval. The reviews in ten newspapers and journals bordered on the ecstatic, building up a picture of a giant’s triumph over physical adversity. They seemed thrilled that he could now conduct standing and how, once he started to conduct, the stick that had supported his walk to the podium, and the rail and stool provided, were no longer needed. Forum (April 1958) started by recalling how Klemperer had appeared in Thomas Mann’s novel Dr Faustus as the composer Leverkühn’s conductor of choice for the première of his Apokalypse. It then praised the “great deeds” to which Klemperer inspired the players in both Mozart and Bruckner and the creative sparks which flew from their collaboration. The Kleines Volksblatt thought that “the grey-haired maestro’s style of interpretation made the music into a spiritual power”. In the Mozart “the themes could freely develop while being held together by the clear exposition of a higher order in the work’s spiritual meaning”. In the Bruckner, a similar method meant that “we heard more, not less, in Klemperer’s performance”. This awareness of “music’s highest sense, its rôle as a spiritual discipline... was the special feature of this concert. It was clear that the musicians recognised this and gave everything in their power to meet Klemperer’s high demands of them… joining with the audience at the end of the concert in thanking the conductor for leading them to this supreme achievement”. “Servant of Art, Lord of Musicians” was the headline of the Neue Weltpresse’s review which hailed Klemperer as “one of the last great conductors of the Wilhelmine era”, alongside Strauss, Nikisch, Weingartner, Blech, Kleiber and Furtwängler, and praised his handling of the Bruckner as “song like, full of streaming lyricism and powerfully shaped climaxes. The music sang and flowed in a manner that seemed to relate it to Schubert’s symphonies”. In London in the 1960s the music of Bruckner and Mahler was heard and accepted more than at the time of Klemperer’s crusading concerts in the 1930s. Klemperer was asked at this time if the reason he played more Mahler than Bruckner was because he believed the former to be the greater composer. “Of course not”, he said, “but it was Mahler who got me my first jobs!”.

Extract from the booklet note by Mike Ashman, 2010