Bruckner Symphony No 1
Simone Young makes brave choices and turns in an admirable Bruckner First
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Anton Bruckner
Genre:
Orchestral
Label: Oehms
Magazine Review Date: 13/2011
Media Format: Super Audio CD
Media Runtime: 49
Mastering:
Stereo
DDD
Catalogue Number: OC633
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Symphony No. 1 |
Anton Bruckner, Composer
Anton Bruckner, Composer Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra Simone Young, Conductor |
Author: Rob Cowan
Young’s choice of the Nowak Linz score is less “original” than tackling the other “first” versions: with this particular edition of the First she is up against Karajan, Barenboim, Jochum, Abbado and Skrowaczewski. Not that their catalogue presence need bother her too much. Here is a Bruckner conductor who understands where the music is going and the contextual significance of detail. Young seems at one with Bruckner’s sound world, how the music breathes and how to balance weighty brass without letting them overwhelm the rest of the orchestra. And she feels the First Symphony’s abundant poetry, especially in the first movement’s second subject and that wonderful moment towards the end of the Adagio where there are such vivid premonitions of the Ninth’s Adagio. The recorded sound settles for the broader canvas whereas, say, Karajan (BPO, DG) and Jochum (Dresden Staatkapelle, EMI) favour more prominent focusing for the strings.
What I like most about this performance, and about others in the series that I have so far heard (Nos 2 and 8), is its mixture of drama and warmth, its sense of journeying through a sizeable, open landscape (Young is, after all, Australian!). As recent Bruckner series go, I’d rate hers, Marek Janowski’s with the Suisse Romande (Pentatone) and Marcus Bosch’s spacious-sounding Aachen Symphony Orchestra set (Coviello Classics, now almost complete) pretty high on the list.
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