Bruckner´s "Fifth"
Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 5 in Bb major is, in the most literal sense, music of the future: music which at its conception stood ouside its own time as music for future generations. By intertwining pioneering harmony with contrapuntal forms which look back to the Renaissance and the Baroque, the composer dared to build a unique bridge between the past and the future, thus creating a work whose tonal language never ceases to astonish. It is somehow appropriate, therefore, that this „contrapuntal masterpiece“, as Bruckner proudly called it, is the only one of his completed and numbered symphonies which he was never to hear in its orchestral form. „Perhaps he wrote no other work which so blithely disregards conventional dimensions and objectives, or the capacity of a normal listener to take it all in, as in this symphony“, was the verdict of the music writer Theodor Helm after the first performance of the piano version on 20th April 1887.
Christian Thielemann celebrates his long-desired Brucknerhaus début with this concert. Thus one of the great Bruckner conductors of our time, at the helm of the Sächsischen Staatskapelle Dresden, an ochestra steeped in tradition, will devote himself to the fascinating, virtuoso „intemperance“ of Bruckner's eternally modern masterpiece.
Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Symphony Nr. 5 in Bb major, WAB 105 (1875–76, rev. 1877–78)
Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden
Christian Thielemann | Conductor