Bruckner wrote his F minor Study Symphony in 1863 for his teacher, the cellist and part-time conductor of Linz's Municipal Theatre, Otto Kitzler. Bruckner was 39 and in the process of shaking the dust off a provincial career that had so far brought him distinction only as an organist and as a craftsman-composer of the old school. Kitzler was also a provincial musician, but he was well versed in Beethoven's compositional methods and as a working instrumentalist he seems to have been shrewdly aware of what the leading contemporary composers were up to. In 1862 Kitzler decided to stage Linz's first production of Wagner's Tannhauser, a score he went through note-for-note with Bruckner. There are few direct echoes of the opera in the Study Symphony but the entry of Wagner into Bruckner's life seems to have had a transforming effect. Around this time, Bruckner likened himself to a watchdog that had slipped its chain; and four-square as much of the Study Symphony is, it conveys just that sense of a barely-checked yearning for the epic symphonic tussles that Bruckner seems to have been fated to undertake.
Inbal's Frankfurt performance is magnificent, entirely eclipsing the ill-played and ill-recorded Rozhdestvensky performance on Le Chant du Monde. Teldec have provided the work with a particularly spacious and powerful recording and the Frankfurt players seem determined to end in royal style what has been a fine and unusually wide-ranging cycle of Bruckner symphony recordings. Not even the horrendous edit at track 3, 3'10'' can detract from the splendours of a disc that completely overturns any ideas one might have had of this being Bruckner at his most jejune.'