Subscription Concerts 2024-2025Program A
No. 2016 Subscription (Program A)

The world has celebrated the 200th birthday of Anton Bruckner (1824–1896) at present: the Austrian late-Romantic composer was born on September 4th, 1824 as the eldest son of a schoolmaster who was also a musician. No sooner had the father introduced his child to music, he displayed a remarkable talent. The future symphonist subsequently became a chorister at St. Florian Monastery where he studied music deepening his Catholic faith. He then made a living as a schoolteacher and church organist prior to moving to Vienna in 1868 in his mid-forties. It is only from that moment that most of his representative works including Symphonies No. 2 to No. 9 were penned. The late bloomer had to put up with the cold reception of his works for quite some time until the successful premiere of No. 7 in December 1884 spread his fame far and wide.
Back in July of the same year, Bruckner set to work on No. 8, his next tonal cathedral— his symphonies are often called so due to their large scale, massive sound, meditative moments and frequent general (long) pauses evoking a cathedral’s long reverberation. Bruckner completed No. 8 in 1887 and sent the score to the conductor Hermann Levi, a champion of his music. Devastated by Levi’s rejection, the composer would greatly revise it to produce the 1890 second version, which was followed by the 1892 edition (based on the second version) for the first publication. Among the different editions issued posthumously, the most frequently performed nowadays is the 1955 one (based on the second version). For today’s concert, our conductor Fabio Luisi chose the rarely-performed 1887 first version that he is deeply versed in. This occasion must reveal to us Bruckner’s intact initial conception of the work preceding numerous modifications.
Cast in four movements, No. 8 precedes the Adagio (slow) movement with the Scherzo movement on the model of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. As for orchestration, Wagner tubas (oval-shaped brass instruments) lend more gravity to Bruckner’s already-stately sound.
A striking difference between No. 8’s first and second versions is the ending of the opening C-minor movement written as a three-theme sonata: the first version finishes with an abrupt loud (fff) coda in C major, which was fully cut at Bruckner’s revision so the second version would end softly. The next Scherzo is in A–B–A form: Bruckner famously replaced the 1887 original trio without harps (B section) by a brand-new trio with harps for the second version. The third movement is a grand Adagio in D-flat major in A–B–A–B–A–coda form: at the climax prior to the coda, six cymbal crashes are heard in the first version instead and only two in the second version. The finale in C minor, a freely-designed three-theme sonata, concludes the symphony in bright C major, combining four themes of all the four movements.

[Kumiko Nishi]