Hartmut Haenchen

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Written around 1914, the Drei Orchesterstücke — Three Pieces for Orchestra: Präludium, Reigen and Marsch — are the Austrian composer’s first work for large orchestra and mark his separation from his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, to whom the work was nevertheless dedicated, on his fortieth birthday. Their broad symphonic sweep is turned towards the future, but keeps a close eye on Mahler. In the last piece, Marsch, the presence of a «great hammer», which intervenes with three blows at the climax of the march and again in the final bar, seems to foreshadow starkly the coming apocalypse of the Great War.

«My Sixth Symphony is the cheekiest, but also the most sincere». Anton Bruckner worked on it in several stages, as was his habit, over almost two years from 1879 to 1881, and at its first appearance — not in its complete form — it even drew applause from Johannes Brahms, who was considered the Austrian composer’s natural opposite. From the opening bars one senses the most authentic Bruckner climate, with repeated violins in transparency creating a fantastic halo in pianissimo, at once reinforced by the imperious low notes of cellos and double basses, in expectation of the thunderous theme that literally builds the sonic architecture. Memorable is the great Adagio of the Sixth, pensive and grieving in its gait, foreshadowing that of the Seventh Symphony, which seduced the cinematic imagination of Luchino Visconti. It was Gustav Mahler who, in 1899, three years after Bruckner’s death, conducted the first complete performance of the Sixth.