Bruckner: Symphony No. 7

Anton Bruckner had to wait an age before bagging his first and greatest success. The Austrian composer’s Seventh Symphony, first performed in Leipzig in 1884 shortly after his sixtieth birthday, proved an immediate hit. Vladimir Jurowski’s visionary interpretation of the work with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra, recorded live at the Berlin Philharmonie, stands as the utterly compelling outcome of the conductor’s profound study and long experience of performing Bruckner’s music. He’s backed to the hilt by superlative playing, remarkable for its intense focus, lyrical warmth, and jaw-dropping beauty.

Although the score escaped the byzantine process of revision that Bruckner habitually applied to his works, its first edition included changes made after the symphony’s premiere. Jurowski decided to use the subsequent edition made by Robert Haas in the 1940s, to which he added elements from later scholarly editions, the cymbal crash and percussion at the climax of the work’s slow movement among them.

The business of Bruckner editions, he tells Apple Music Classical, sets a minefield for conductors. “And it’s also a minefield, particularly with this symphony, to establish your own handwriting in interpreting it or not over-interpreting it, allowing the music to speak with its own voice. What helps in my relationship with Bruckner is the fact that I’ve been marching along a self-chosen route by performing his symphonies chronologically, doing them version by version, in the order in which they were written.”

The Seventh Symphony, notes Jurowski, is less experimental, certainly less radical in style than its predecessors, at least until the work’s finale where Bruckner the organist takes center stage. “The solo organist in him suddenly starts speaking out. And he becomes a master improviser, but instead of an organ, he has the full symphony orchestra at his disposal.

“It struck me as remarkable, and also strange, that of the many wonderful interpretations of this symphony on record very few, if any, take his tempo indications in the final movement seriously. They are the opposite of decoration; they’re form building. The finale is the least predictable and the most inventive, the most interesting movement, without which the whole building of Bruckner’s symphonic thought is impossible to comprehend.”

Bruckner began work on his Seventh Symphony following a visit to Bayreuth to hear the premiere of Wagner’s opera Parsifal. His reverence for the man he called “the Master” surfaces in the Seventh’s solemn slow movement, which opens with a quartet of Wagner tubas and was completed as a memorial composition after Bruckner received news of Wagner’s death.

Vladimir Jurowski cautions against exaggerating the Seventh Symphony’s association with Wagner. “In a way, it’s some kind of anti-Wagner creation,” he says. “He uses certain [Wagnerian] sonorities, but there it ends. And also he uses them extremely sparingly. Look at how he uses the Wagner tubas, which always sound like a voice from another dimension, the voice of eternity. I insisted in our performance that the tubas should sit separately from the horns. That makes their appearance special, particularly in the finale where they’re rarely used.”

Beyond devoting hours in rehearsal to details of balance, blend, and intonation, Jurowski employed vivid imagery to describe how he wanted certain passages to sound. “I was trying to get my violins to perform the opening of the finale in a certain way,” he recalls, “and found there was too much forward-thrusting marching about their playing. ‘Forget about the march,’ I said. ‘It’s not a march.’ Searching for a metaphor, I said, ‘Well, it’s like angels beating their wings. Just imagine the weight of these wings. It would be like a butterfly’s weight, no more than that. Maybe there’s an archangel amongst them, but definitely no archbishop!’ They laughed and that’s when things began going in the right direction.”

Inside the Album Booklet
The booklet liner notes take an in-depth journey into the cultural and musical context of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, alongside its Wagnerian influences, plus there are photos of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra during recording sessions.

Album booklets are available in version 2.0 of Apple Music Classical, which you can download now and enjoy as part of your Apple Music subscription. To access booklets, tap on the book icon at the top of your screen.