Sir Simon Rattle conducts music in which vast landscapes merge with the human soul: Sibelius’ tone poems and Bruckner’s radiant Seventh Symphony. Bruckner said that the beginning of his Seventh Symphony came to him in a dream, played by an angel. This huge, glowing mountain-range of sound is basically soul music by any other name. Far away in Finland, meanwhile, Sibelius was thinking big too. Whether it’s the sun dancing on the Mediterranean sea, or the forests of the far north, you can practically feel the freshness in the air. Sir Simon Rattle has been conducting Sibelius since he was a teenager, making him an unrivalled guide through this untamed musical landscape. PROGRAM Sibelius: The Oceanides, Tapiola; Bruckner: Symphony No. 7
Karajan conducts Bruckner 8
Nearly a century after its premiere in Vienna in 1892, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8 receives a brilliant interpretation by the great conductor Herbert von Karajan and the Wiener Philharmoniker—the direct orchestral descendant of the ensemble that gave the masterpiece’s very first performance! Encouraged by the triumph of his Seventh Symphony, Bruckner produced his Eighth after three years of intense work, pushed by the implacable conductor Hermann Levi to make so many revisions that it became a “suicidal obsession”. Even with Levi’s demands, the Eighth would prove to be one of the longest symphonies in the history of music!
Karajan conducts Bruckner 9
A passionate enthusiast for new technologies and new concert formats, Herbert von Karajan was a pioneer in the translation of the symphonic concert experience to film. One of the first to grasp the importance of film and CDs, would immortalize numerous works of the classical canon using these two mediums over the course of his career. Never satisfied with confining himself to musical direction, Karajan was heavily involved in the technical side of his recordings, going so far as to to dictate the placement of individual cameras. In this performance of Bruckner’s unfinished Symphony No. 9, Karajan’s talents as both music director and filmmaker are palatable: an exceptional testimony to both the maestro and this essential masterpiece of the pivotal transitional period between Romanticism and Modernism.