Anton Bruckner

I have been spending a lot of time in Bruckner's sound universe, having now listened to Symphonies Nos 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 in the Daniel Barenboim / Warner Classics box set. I came across an interesting observation in the notes to Symphony No. 5, by Hans-Christian Schmid (not the film director?), who refers to Bruckner's "strange discontinuities of mood and development." Those discontinuities are quite apparent even to a musically untutored listener and help explain why it takes a number of hearings to acclimatize oneself to most of the Bruckner symphonies. The most immediately coherent, everyone seems to agree, and hence the most popular, is No. 7, which also benefits from uniformly superb thematic material. No. 5, the occasion of Schmid's comment, is a far more challenging mountain to approach; it seems to offer one sort of music ("lofty, hymn-like figures" with "dense, organ-like writing"), and then another ("idyllic passages...filled with bucolic naivety"), without immediate clarity as to why. But these leaps unquestionably make the symphonies both utterly distinctive (no one else would write this way!) and curiously proto-modern even when the sonorities are firmly Wagnerian. And the rewards of persevering with the music are considerable, not least in the thrill of the massive climaxes that no Bruckner symphony is without.