Search - Anton Bruckner, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Wilhelm Furtwangler :: Symphony 8

A very good recording

Greg Lumelsky | New York, NY | 01/03/2000

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This is a juggernaut of a performance. It was recorded in Berlin on March 15, 1949. It has moments of great delicacy and concentrated power, and under Wilhelm Furtwängler's baton the music travels from one side of the spectrum to the other with astonishing naturalness, beauty and cohesiveness. As for the sound, imagine yourself inside a cast iron tub just beneath the kettle drums, and you will have something of an idea about the quality of the audio, especially at the more Wagnerian decibels. Given the year of performance, this is almost certainly a mono recording, although the jacket omits any indication either way. But if recorded sound is not a primary concern, this recording is one I would not want to be without."

Mercurial approach!

Hiram Gomez Pardo | Valencia, Venezuela | 11/01/2005

(5 out of 5 stars)

"It is not easy to face and listen Bruckner. Not only because he is far to be entitled under a specific category; and this fact is determinant and talks us about his genius as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert or Wagner. They do not follow the rules, but his own muse and even create and establish his own universe. That is why it so difficult to employ minor epithets such tendencies or styles, because they have nothing to do with those labels.



The wide gamut of achieved sonorities, the wide emotional range, the wholeness present through the broadness of his musical writing leads us from the starkly austere chorale; silence and shattering fortissimo outbursts, impregnated of strong Wagnerian harmony but always inspired in the nature of the cosmos. His music is a true journey without time and frontiers, where the musical form is in constant movement and dynamic change, where epic and tragedy, contemplation and action, rapture and emotion are overlapped and interweaved, through the several orchestral voices. And such kaleidoscopic facets of anima states can disconcert for the newcomer listener. Because as the great artists establishes his own physical and spirit time, creating atmospheres. Here you have the reason of his authenticity and originality, they seem to compose according a mythic time; and that sounds us so far, specially in those ages where the modern times have flattened the cathartic experience, and the extreme rationality has demolished the tragic mood, reducing Oedipus universal tragedy to a simple sexual syndrome.



The Eighth Symphony is the most expansive, pyramidal and ambitious of all his works. That huge gamut of emotions is hard to put in words, because you must absolutely engaged and committed with this mythic journey.



Fürtwangler 's wisdom, the presence of a first rate Orchestra and the mercurial conviction in search of this experience makes the great difference respect the other visions, that can be accepted or rejected according your particular values code



This is a historic register and an invaluable musical legacy for all those who really are disposed to carry out the journey. And I hope you are.

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