The Cleveland Orchestra & Franz Welser-Möst - Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 "Romantic" (2024)

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The Cleveland Orchestra & Franz Welser-Möst - Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 "Romantic" (2024)

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The Cleveland Orchestra will release a new audio recording of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 led by Music Director Franz Welser-Möst on August 16 as it prepares to perform the work on tour in Europe later this summer.

The release of Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 is just one way The Cleveland Orchestra is commemorating the composer’s bicentennial. On August 20, the Orchestra premieres Bruckner’s Fourth on its digital streaming platform, Adella, in a new video production featuring an interview with Welser-Möst discussing the work and the composer.

Welser-Möst then leads the Orchestra in this same symphony on September 4, which marks the 200th anniversary of Bruckner’s birth, in the composer’s hometown of Ansfelden, Austria. This special performance outside the parish church opens the International Bruckner Festival Linz 2024 in collaboration with Brucknerhaus Linz. The Orchestra performs the work again on September 6 at the Musikverein in Vienna.

“The Cleveland Orchestra and I are really looking forward to celebrating Anton Bruckner’s anniversary with his Fourth Symphony on September 4 with music enthusiasts in Ansfelden,” Welser-Möst said. “Bruckner’s music was deeply rooted in the traditions of his homeland, but in many ways, his compositions were far ahead of his time. This may be one of the reasons why his music has not lost its appeal. It inspires audiences through a profound listening experience.”

Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 was recorded live on March 14, 16, and 17, 2024 in the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center, home of The Cleveland Orchestra. It opens quietly with a simple horn call, before bursting into a towering blaze of sound from the full ensemble.

This is The Cleveland Orchestra’s third recording of 2024, following the release of Béla Bartók’s String Quartet No. 3 (arranged for double string orchestra by Cleveland Orchestra Assistant Principal Viola Stanley Konopka) and his Suite from The Miraculous Mandarin, and Sergei Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 6. Visit The Cleveland Orchestra’s recordings website for more information on all recent recordings.

About Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4 (by Thomas May)
Anton Bruckner had to wait until the public premiere of his Fourth Symphony in 1881 to enjoy his first real taste of success, following years of bitter rejection in his adopted city of Vienna. Possibly to enhance its chances of being accepted, the composer allowed the Fourth to be published with the official subtitle “Romantic,” and listeners have as a result been introduced to the work as the epitome of Romanticism in symphonic music.

However, the Brucknerian aesthetic contrasts sharply with Romantic drama, instinctively tending toward a more spiritual contemplation. His music creates a sense of sonic spaciousness and awe that is unique to him. As commentator Robert Simpson writes, Bruckner’s symphonies illustrate a quest toward an “essence crystallized, the sky through which the earth moves.”

The Fourth Symphony’s much-admired opening acquires something of its mysterious power by incorporating a minor-key inflection into the horn call’s simple, otherwise major-key harmonic palette, all set against a pregnant backdrop of trembling strings. The prominence of the horn is a hallmark of the rest of the symphony—the instrument appears almost as a protagonist in its own right.

The rest of the Fourth continues to carry out the implications of its vast opening design. Bruckner establishes a solemnly measured gait in the march-like Andante, developing this C-minor slow movement from three interconnected sections of material presented in succession. After this, the third-movement “hunting” Scherzo, with its overlapping “Bruckner rhythms” (a duplet-followed-by-triplet pattern) in horns and brass, instills a rush of energy to complement the slow motion of the preceding march.

The Finale’s titanic opening shows Bruckner at his most confident, evoking a sense of mystery similar to what we encountered at the beginning of the work. The main theme coalesces against thundering timpani, while the fundamental contrast of epic against relaxed nature returns once more in the second theme group. By the time Bruckner arrives at the stunning final coda, writes Simpson, the effect is altogether different from that of “the accumulated energy of a vividly muscular process (as in the Classical symphony)” or of “the warring of emotive elements (as in the purely Romantic work)” but instead reveals “the final intensification of an essence.”