Luogo e data di registrazione		Musikhalle, Hamburg (Germania) - 15-17 marzo 1992
	Registrazione: live / studio		live recording
	Recording supervisor		Gerald Götze
	Recording engineer		Karl-Otto Bremer
	Editing		Suse Wöllmer
	Prima Edizione LP		nessuna
	Edizione CD		SONY [RCA VICTOR Red Seal] - 09026 61398 2 - (1 CD - 65' 05") - (p) 1993 - DDD
	Note		A Co-Production of Bertelsmann Music Croup & Norddeutscher Rundfunk Hamburg

Anton Bruckner After years of rejection and neglect, the reception of Anton Bruckner as a symphonic composer took a decisive turn in 1884 with his Seventh Symphony in E. Up to this point the composer had faced a veritable fortress of stupidity, humiliation and hostility in Vienna. He, and especially his symphonies, had been the favorite target of the conservative Viennese critical press, who saw in him “by far the most dangerous musical innovator of our time” and feared through him the “transferral of Wagner's dramatic style to the symphony.” It is amazing that Bruckner nonetheless held fast to his convictions, and was willing to yield to current taste and revise his symphonies only under the pressure of ever-increasing resistance. On December 30, 1884, in the presence of the composer, a young opera conductor named Arthur Nikisch directed the first performance of Bruckners Seventh at the Leipzig Stadttheater, before an audience which, though certainly conservative, was open-minded compared with the Viennese. Their full quarter-hour of applause signaled a historic moment, which itself would be superseded a few weeks later at a second performance. The unanimous enthusiasm for Hermann Levi's interpretation at the Munich Odeon on March 10, 1885, culminated in the statement of the South German Press and Munich News that the composition “could only be compared to Beethoven's most magnificent works.” This was a break-through for the 60-year-old Anton Bruckner; his hour had indeed arrived. But not wholly: the time was not yet ripe for an unprejudiced reception of Bruckner which might be directed exclusively toward the original versions of his symphonies; even today that is fairly remote. But since Bruckner produced only one authoritative version of his Seventh Symphony (composed between September 1881 and September 1883), the problem should not arise here - yet it does. The autograph actually reveals that Bruckner made a number of revisions after the first performance, among them the insertion of a controversial cymbalcrash at the climax of the the slow movement (at rehearsal-letter W), which had not originally been in the score. On January 10, 1885, Bruckner's pupil Josef Schalk wrote to his brother Franz: “Perhaps you have not heard that Nikisch has put through the cymbal-crash we wanted so much in the Adagio (on the C-major six-four chord), along with the triangle and timpani, which makes us tremendously happy.” Bruckner gave in to the pleas of the young kapellmeister Nikisch and glued a strip into the right margin of the autograph score, with the added parts for timpani, triangle and cymbals, but at the same time he put six question-marks undemeath, expressing his doubts. Some time later, he crossed out the question-marks with a heavy stroke and wrote above the whole addition, “No good.” Common performance practice unfortunately still ignores Bruckner's retraction, and understandably prefers the spectacular cymbal-crash. Two further inconsistencies are usually overlooked as well. In the first instance, the added timpani part as notated one bar after W does not go with the orchestral bass part on the tonic C, but persists for an extra bar on the dominant G. It seems the timpani comes a bar too late, although, to be sure, the “suspension” is not heard as a dissonance. In the second instance, the Seventh Symphony is the only one of Bruckner's nine in which the original version of the slow movement has no parts for timpani, cymbals or triangle. The conductor therefore has every reason to take the composers original version seriously, and to ignore the additions on musical and aesthetic grounds. Moreover, Bruckner's Seventh does not need these effects for its success, which is due rather to the power of its ideas and the intelligibility of their development, to the relative simplicity and understandability of its architecture, ultimately to the inimitable glow of the score. It is entirely dependent upon the harmony and color that come from Bruckner's own blending of organlike instrumentation with the brilliance of a kaleidoscopic orchestration. The use of four tubas is only one of the evidences of Richard Wagner's influence. This tuba quartet casts its color over the second movement in particular, which Bruckner intended as an epitaph for Wagner. (In fact, the news of Wagner's death reached Bruckner when he was starting to write the coda: “and then I began to write the real funeral music for the Master.”) It is an Adagio full of dignity and grandeur, whose climax (letter W) is the culmination of the entire symphony, from which point everything generally slopes away, notwithstanding later ascents. Preceding it is a sonata-allegro of three themes, whose development serves only as a preparation or introduction to the slow movement, and which contrasts as much to it in meaning and intensity as does the Scherzo that follows. Like the introductory Allegro and the Finale, this Scherzo in three-part song fomr is built upon the pure natural intervals of the fourth and fifth, which usually suggest nature-idylls or Austrian folklore. But instead this Scherzo whirls demonically, catching its breath only in a softly luminous Trio. “With motion, but not fast,” the Finale recalls the beginning of the symphony with a variant of the first theme of the first movement. But now Bruckner transforms its hesitant restraint into energetic, high-strung activity, until he actually refers back to the symphony's beginning in the coda (an original structure combining elements of rondo and sonata form), blending that theme with the closing material. It would be hard to imagine an inner logic and unity more effective than the symphonic events bracketed between these two ideas. Ekkehart Kroher (Translation: Lucy Cross; Byword, London)