by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING TODAY:
At noon, the Brownbag Concert series at Trinity Cathedral gets an early start with a performance by Lea Marra & the River Boys. It’s free, and lunches are welcome.
Continuing their European Tour, Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra are in Austria to mark Anton Bruckner’s 200th birthday with an open air concert today at the Pfarrkirche in Bruckner’s home village of Ansfelden that includes Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 4, “Romantic.”
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Anton Bruckner was born in Ansfelden, Austria on this date in 1824. Before Mariss Jansons and Amsterdam’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra played three of his immense symphonies in London in 2014, Tom Service wrote in The Guardian that the Dutch visitors
will unleash sounds of orchestral ugliness and visions of existential disturbance that will – that should – have you quaking in your seats.
These works – Bruckner’s 4th, 7th and his unfinished 9th – opened up a new musical and spiritual terrain. The titanic shocks that these paradoxical pieces delivered were achieved by a man who worshipped the gods of musical conservatism at a time when the rules of composition were being dismantled by the likes of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss. Bruckner, by contrast, spent his life exploring musical principles that had been laid down centuries earlier – the laws of counterpoint, the way one musical voice interacts with another – which marked him out as a cranky weirdo in the context of the progressive artistic and intellectual scene of late 19th-century Vienna.
Bruckner’s symphonies have inspired The Cleveland Orchestra to sonic heights over the seasons. Click here for a complete, live performance of No. 8 led by George Szell in 1964, and here for a performance of No. 4 led by Franz Welser-Möst at the Stiftsbasilika St. Florian, near Welser-Möst’s home town of Linz in Austria. The Orchestra will play No. 4 today in Ansfelden to mark the composer’s 200th birthday.
