Confronting Anton Bruckner Again

Lorin Maazel on the cover of the forthcoming box of his Complete Warner Edition

I usually do not write about recordings that will be released more than a week in the future. However, I have begun listening to the CDs collected in Lorin Maazel: The Complete Warner Edition; and I realized that the first two CDs sent me on a chase down past articles, not only on this site but also from my tenure with examiner.com. Both of those CDs contain a single symphony by Anton Bruckner: WAB 107 (the seventh in E major) and WAB 108 (the eighth in C minor). That chase had much to do with the fact that, during his tenure with the San Francisco Symphony, Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) was not shy in introducing Bruckner symphonies to the audience; and, as many might guess, there was a fair amount of different reactions!

To be fair, I put a lot of my own effort into the twenty CDs in the Profil release, Anton Bruckner: The Collection. I encountered that collection during my tenure with Examiner.com. At that time I knew I was constrained to keeping my article relatively brief, so I tried to restrict myself to “nuts and bolts.” The fact that Maazel limited his Bruckner albums (originally from EMI) to only two symphonies urged me to take a “deeper dive.”

That “dive” took me back to the days when MTT was responsible for my earliest efforts of “deep listening” to Bruckner symphonies. I wrote about his encounter with WAB 107 in November of 2016, when I wrote about a concert that previewed the selection to be performed at the concerts taking place during a tour of Asia. By that time I was able to write: “MTT’s Bruckner performances just keep getting better;” and these days I relish opportunities to listen WAB 107, both of the multiple recordings I have and those rare opportunities when the symphony shows up on a concert program.

Quite honestly, I wish I had a time machine that would enable me to compare MTT’s approach with Maazel’s. On the other hand, Maazel’s two recordings deserve to be experienced on their own terms, rather than through comparison. In that context, I shall probably return to both of the Warner CDs with generous frequency while continuing to maintain fond memories of MTT!