The celebrated Bruckner cycle by the Hamburg Philharmonic under Simone Young saw its completion during the 2014–15 season. On 30 August 2014, this mature, practiced Brucknerian orchestra recorded Bruckner’s radiant Seventh Symphony in the Laeiszhalle, heard live on this CD. With the beauty of its themes and its moving homage to Bruckner‘s great, intimidating model, Wagner, this Symphony - ranking among the composer’s finest orchestral statements - offers a particularly impressive listening experience.

REVIEWS:

The most apposite word I can apply to Simone Young's approach to Bruckner is 'fluidity.' She allows the lyrical melodies of the first two movements to unfold naturally and with a good sense of structural cohesion.

-- BBC Music Magazine

I enjoyed this performance very much. I also liked the sound on this SACD which has presence and definition. There’s a good front-to-back perspective and all sections of the orchestra have been well served by the engineers. In particular the brass, so important in Bruckner’s sound-world, register very satisfyingly yet never excessively.

-- MusicWeb International

This is one of those performances where you feel from the opening phrases that everything is just right. The music soars, yet has all the heft and depth one could want. Orchestral balances are excellent… Above all, the spirit of Bruckner, often felt in the concert hall but so elusive in recordings, is present. This is a glorious Bruckner Seventh.

-- Fanfare

Well what d’ya know? The old man’s got some piss and vinegar in him still. I’ve never quite forgiven Haitink for giving an interview in Gramophone magazine over a decade ago decrying the tendency of conductors to remake recordings of the same repertoire over and over, and then hypocritically becoming one of the very worst offenders. Perhaps the reason that this account of the Sixth is so fabulous is because it’s only his second “official” recording of the work (well, third if, as a reader kindly reminded me, you count a live Dresden version released on Profil). Anyway, the point is that it seems that he left it alone, relatively speaking, until he had something new to say.

Mind you, his earliest version, part of his very first Bruckner cycle in Amsterdam, was quite good, if perhaps a touch faceless, but here he retains all of those qualities of freshness and vitality that characterized the previous performance, while adding an extra bit of gravitas to the Adagio, and a trenchancy of rhythm everywhere else that elevates this recording to another level entirely. It’s particularly salutary to hear how Haitink zeros in on the music’s special, rambunctious character within Bruckner’s symphonic output as a whole. That means the first movement’s ostinato rhythm doesn’t just repeat: it really moves. The scherzo’s gossamer lightness floats over the bar lines as Bruckner intended, while the finale benefits from having vividly differentiated thematic material. Too often, the movement comes off as a disappointing, generalized trudge across the finish line.

Indeed, the whole performance acts as a tonic to the modern tendency to conduct Bruckner as an experiment in sluggishness: slow, slower, and as slow as humanly possible. The composer considered this work to be his “boldest” symphony, and Haitink clearly got the message. The Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra plays magnificently, the warmly burnished brass riding a rich cushion of strings–noble, expressive, grand but never crude. It’s the genuine Bruckner sound, while the engineering does the interpretation full justice. A great release.

– ClassicsToday (10/10; David Hurwitz)

When the ORFEO label was established in Munich forty years ago, surely no one with the music scene back then would have predicted that the record company would develop into a firmly established player on the classical music market. One of the label’s main priorities in the early years was vocal music, with opera rarities top of the list and since the mid 1980s the re-use of historic tape recordings. Big names featured on the label’s own productions, while ORFEO also developed into a talent factory by discovering and nurturing young artist. This “Legendary Conductors” 10 album set for the anniversary of 40 years of ORFEO label history presents a selection of outstanding recordings with legendary conductors in the true sense of the word.

Symphony No. 5 is widely considered as the finest among the nine numbered symphonies of Anton Bruckner, and ranks among his most famous works. In their first recording on Chandos for almost ten years, the Residentie Orchestra The Hague here performs the work under its chief conductor, Neeme Järvi, who has conducted the symphony with orchestras across the globe, and is recognised as one of the key interpreters of it. The reputation of the Residentie Orchestra The Hague as one of the finest orchestras in Europe makes it an appropriate figurehead for The Hague as a cosmopolitan city of justice, peace and culture.

Before the great wave of Bruckner conducting that has taken place since the 1970s, it was Hans Knappertsbusch (1888–1966) who stood out as unquestionably one of the most important Bruckner exponents, and Bruckner was part of his core repertoire. There are several recordings by him of the 3rd to 5th and 7th to 9th Symphonies, two in the case of the Seventh, a live recording from the 1949 Salzburg Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic, and this transfer direct from the original tapes of 1963 (and not “off the air”) with the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra. The Seventh is particularly suited to comparison with older recordings insofar as there is no question of the alternative versions and editions we otherwise associate with Bruckner. The difference between the two recordings is substantial, which is no particular surprise when it comes to “Kna”. His later reading released here is painted on a broader canvas, goes into less individual detail; at the same time, one can appreciate how comprehensively Knappertsbusch plans the grand design while noting with amazement – especially at the brass-scored fortissimo climaxes typical of Bruckner – how energetically the conductor shapes, phrases, “turns into music” even here, something one does not hear these days. The orchestra is impressive for its exceptional solo contributions. It is the same orchestra that would record the Bruckner symphonies complete with Günther Wand a decade later.

There are at least four versions of Anton Bruckner's 2nd Symphony; the last one was written in 1892. Frequently, however – as on this recording – the original version is preferred; as usual with Bruckner, this version of 1872 is bolder and longer. Already very early on, the composer changed the order of movements in this work, which was felt by many to be a response to the dramaturgy of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The Scherzo, as the second movement, has changed places with the ensuing Adagio. In the later version, he also almost completely eliminated the most striking characteristic of this creation, probably due to the urging of his friends and supporters, especially Johann Herbeck: eight of the nine famous tutti rests in the first movement disappear completely. Another special characteristic of the original version is the solo horn passage in the Adagio, written in an extremely difficult register for the instruments of that time – but also of moving beauty.