To mark the 100th birthday of legendary conductor Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, MDG has released a live recording of Bruckner's 8th Symphony with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra in cooperation with Denon, in Bruckner's bicentenary year. With a career spanning eight decades, the 93-year-old conductor moulds Bruckner's last completed symphony into a moving legacy: the crowning achievement a life's work.
Born in Lviv, Poland (now part of Ukraine) in 1923, Skrowaczewski began violin and piano lessons at the age of four, and he composed his first symphony by age eight. At 11, he made his debut as a pianist and at 13 conducted and was soloist in Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto. This career ended when, in a WWII air raid, he suffered two broken hands and was left with nerve damage. He then turned to composing and conducting. Bruckner's music had transfixed him since he was a boy.
Anton Bruckner did not have it easy as a composer. Appointed late in life and plagued by constant self-doubt, he often reworked his compositions several times. Neither was he initially well-received by the public: the premiere of his 7th symphony turned into a veritable scandal after the audience left the hall in droves. However, his 8th was a triumphant success: the audience applauded enthusiastically after every movement and the composer was praised as "a giant", "a poet" "a great genius" by the likes of Hugo Wolf, Hans Richter and Johannes Brahms.
In the restrained, introspective coda of the first movement, the music softly fades away, in keeping with the opening of the work. Bruckner described it as a "Totenuhr" (death knell): "It's as if you are lying on your death-bed and there is a clock hanging on the wall opposite and inexorably ticking away the seconds while your life slowly ebbs away: tick, tock, tick, tock..." Bruckner passed away before he could complete his 9th Symphony, making the 8th, the longest symphony he had ever written, his magnum opus.
Also available:
Bruckner: Symphonies No. 4 & 7 - Staatskapelle Dresden, Herbert Blomstedt, conductor (MDG6502194)
