Luogo e data di registrazione		Semperoper, Dresden (Germania) - marzo 1999
	Registrazione: live / studio		live recording
	Executive Producer		Ewald Markl
	Recording Producer		Arend Prohmann
	Tonmeister (Balance Engineer)		Klaus Hiemann
	Recording Engineer		Jürgen Bulgrin, Wolf-Dieter Karwatky
	Post-Production		Oliver Rogalla
	Prima Edizione LP		-
	Prima Edizione CD		Deutsche Grammophon | 469 527-2 | LC 0173 |1 CD - 76' 37" | (p) 2001 | DDD
	Note		-

The February of 1875, when he began composing his Fifth Symphony, found Bruckner isolated and ill at ease in Vienna. The city’s sophisticated atmosphere and manners little suited him, he was poorly paid for his teaching at the Conservatory, and the Vienna Philharmonic had dismissed his Third Symphony as “unplayable” after a trial performance. If he found difficulty in protecting himself from his enemies, in particular the phalanx of critics led by the powerful Eduard Hanslick, he also needed preservation from his friends; for, in an effort to win his music acceptance, some of them set about revising and rewriting the symphonies so as to make them more palatable to the Viennese audience. Savage cuts were inflicted, and the music was reorchestrated, often in a style closer to that of Bruckner's most influential admirer, Richard Wagner. Beset with self-doubt, Bruckner accepted this interference and was even persuaded to make revisions himself. In well-meaning attempts to get the music some sort of a hearing, there were public performances in two-piano arrangements; and, indeed, the only penformance of the Fifth Symphony that the composer ever heard was given in this form, by Franz Schalk and Franz Zottmann. Schalk later conducted his own cut and re-orchestrated version of the work in Graz on 9 April 1894, one which would have appalled Bruckner even more had he been well enough to travel to hear it. The whole history of Bruckner revisions is a notoriously complicated one; suffice it to say that nowadays the most widely accepted version of this symphony (as of others) is Bruckner's own original, as recorded here, which he largely completed in 1876, making some slight revisions in 1877-78. In defence of Bruckner’s opponents, it may be said that the symphonies’ originalities would have seemed the more confusing to Viennese audiences that saw themselves as partakers in a tradition handed down from Haydn and Mozart by way of Beethoven and Schubert to its current legatee, Johannes Brahms. Even today, when he has long been accepted as a composer of world stature, Bruckner's music seems disconcertingly different from that of his symphonic forebears. Those approaching the Fifth Symphony, for instance, one of the grandest and most original of the entire cycle, will not find a first movement that gives them two contrasting themes and then takes them through development and finally recapitulation as, in their different ways, Bruckner's predecessors do. He is concerned more with setting out and exploiting contrasted musical gestures. The Fifth opens on strings with a trudging bass figure and soft, mysterious counterpoint; after a brief silence, there is a blaze of sound on wind and brass; then the tempo speeds up on strings until a true Allegro is reached with a new theme under the high tremolo strings that are a familiar Bruckner fingerprint. The relationships between these very different musical gestures only gradually reveal themselves, especially as Bruckner takes his time with modifying them and disclosing their kinship. There is also an unfamiliarity in Bruckner‘s use of keys. Few listeners, as they follow the music, will consciously concern themselves with the fact that Bruckner is making much play with the engagement between B flat (the opening and closing key of the symphony) and D, the key of the two central movements. Yet it is this contest, waged with particular subtlety within the first movement, that gives the music its particular flavour; heard perhaps most immediately as a series of surprising shifts across keys as the main thematic components realign themselves one with another. It remains astonishing music, but for the listener in sympathy with Bruckner, it is his judgement and that of no opponent or interferer which is to be trusted. The slow movement, which Bruckner began first, is in a more familiar melodic vein, with a bleak oboe theme over pacing triplets, later a powerful violin song; and the Scherzo maintains the classical balance between a fastmoving melody, close in spirit to the Ländler of Bruckner’s country origins, and a contrasting Trio. But Bruckner has not abandoned the subtle thematic connections of the first movement; and when he comes to the finale, it is to reaffirm these with a breathtakingly bold gesture, invoking Beethoven‘s Ninth Symphony in his recall of themes from the previous movements. Yet whereas Beethoven reflected upon these in order to discard them in favour of “a new song”, Bruckner gathers his material together in a renewed symphonic effort. All his craft is brought to bear upon the music - and we remember that it was a craft learned inthe organ loft - so that fugal writing plays its part, as also, in a superb climax, does a chorale on brass, a tremendous full orchestral statement of which brings the symphony home in B flat. This was the most powerful symphony Bruckner had yet written, and the most puzzling. Brahms, though personally courteous to the composer, could not find it in himself to be sympathetic to the music. Significantly, it was contemporaries belonging to a newer movement in music who rallied to this master of a form they themselves had largely discarded - Hugo Wolf, fervent in his writings on Bruckner’s behalf, Liszt, harmonically most forward-looking of them all, Wagner, whose death, before he could conduct a promised cycle of the symphonies, left Bruckner heartbroken. John Warrack