Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 in D Minor

“Abbado in Lucerne radiates clarity, wisdom and vision, qualities that over the years one had come to expect of him.” --Gramophone Magazine, September 2014

“Abbado establishes tension right at the outset of the first movement, the horns calling across wide vistas...There is only one word to describe properly the performance of the great Adagio: magnificent. This is emphatically not an elegiac performance; rather, it’s noble in character. Abbado shapes Bruckner’s long paragraphs with complete understanding and always there’s a wonderful sense of line. The playing is simply peerless.” --MusicWeb International, 30th July 2014

BBC Music Magazine
Disc of the month - September 2014

“There is an intensity in the string-playing...and a sense of spiritual striving that culminates in one of the most awe-inspiring accounts of the great concluding adagio I have heard. This is a poignant memory of a magisterial interpreter: a Bruckner Ninth for the ages.” --Sunday Times, 20th July 2014

“There was a transparency to [Abbado's Lucerne Bruckner recordings], which is beautifully captured again on this disc...in this final musical testament, time seems infinitely elastic, and everything has all the space it needs.” --The Guardian, 24th July 2014 *****

“The spiritual intensity of [the slow] movement is quite special. Who needs Bruckner’s uncompleted finale after this?...Abbado’s forces never seem heavy. Slenderer passages have the intimacy of chamber music, the lines of melody delicately coloured and intertwined, deliciously played. Clearly recorded, too.” --The Times, 25th July 2014 ****

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Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 "Romantic"

Bruckner, born near Linz in 1824, is known chiefly as a symphonist. He trained as a schoolteacher and organist, serving in the second capacity in Linz until moving in 1868 to Vienna to teach harmony, counterpoint and organ at the Vienna Conservatory. His success as a composer was varied in his lifetime, his acceptance hampered by his own diffidence and his scores posing editorial problems because of his readiness to revise what he had written. He was nine years the senior of Brahms, who outlived him by six months. Bruckner continued Austro-German symphonic traditions on a massive scale, his techniques of composition influenced to some extent by his skill as an organist and consequently in formal improvisation.

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Bruckner: Symphony No. 9

There’s no doubt as to which of these new Bruckner Ninths is the more seductive. The playing of the Vienna Philharmonic under Claudio Abbado is of exceptional sensuous beauty and technical refinement, and the recording serves it well. Rather than creating an idealised conductor’s perspective, the placing of the microphones gives the listener the impression that he or she is hearing the performance from a good seat in the auditorium (with only the horns slightly recessed). In Abbado’s performance the music unfolds naturally and inevitably: tempi controlled but supple enough to prevent rigidity. --Stephen Johnson, BBC Music Magazine

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