The Europadisc Review
Bruckner - Symphony no.4
Pablo Heras-Casado, Anima Eterna Brugge
£13.75
Heavy brass? Lush strings? Vast ranks of woodwind? Interminably slow speeds, overused tremolos and overpowering unisons giving way deafening climaxes? No wonder the music of Anton Bruckner - whose 200th birthday fell last week - is off-putting to many music lovers. Even the more popular Bruckner symphonies, like No.4 in E flat major (the 'Romantic'), have their detractors. Yet there are other ways, which don't undersell the music's majestic architecture or sonic power, but at the same time reveal an abundance of colours and - most notable of all - an underlying delicacy which can confound the ... read more
Heavy brass? Lush strings? Vast ranks of woodwind? Interminably slow speeds, overused tremolos and overpowering unisons giving way deafening climaxes? No wonder the music of Anton Bruckner - whose 200th birthday fell last week - is off-putting to man... read more
Bruckner - Symphony no.4
Pablo Heras-Casado, Anima Eterna Brugge
The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column
The Other Schoenberg 11th September 2024
11th September 2024
This week marks the sesquicentenary of the birth of Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951), one of the most radically consequential composers of the 20th century and a key figure in the development of musical modernism. To many music-lovers he is still a modernist bogeyman, one of the main culprits who knocked music off-course by dragging it, kicking and screaming, into the realms of atonality and serialism. During this anniversary year, even his musical champions have tended to celebrate the occasion with the more 'listener-friendly' music of his pre-atonal period: works such as Verklarte Nacht, Gurrelieder and Pelleas und Melisande, which stretch and densen but do not essentially break with the late-Romantic tonality of Wagner and Mahler.
If, 150 years since the his birth, Schoenberg's music can still be forbidding to many, his legacy is still a considerable one: not just as... read more