Program booklet for the event
Bruckner's symphonies in their original sound
Adoration
Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 5 in B flat major, written between February 1875 and May 1876, which he himself called his "contrapuntal masterpiece", is a truly immense work, interwoven with a dense network of motivic relationships, whose final movement was for the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler the "most monumental finale in the entire musical literature of the world". The composer never heard his work in its original form, which was not premiered until 1935. In the course of a revision between May 1877 and January 1878, he merely added a bass tuba to the orchestra and changed a few minor details. The symphony therefore exists in only one version.
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart's Requiem in D minor was a central work for Bruckner throughout his life and an important reference point for his own church music. He also repeatedly analysed its score in depth, as evidenced by studies of voice leading, the results of which he entered in his Krakow writing calendar for 1877. It is little known, however, that it served him as a kind of blueprint and 'motif source' for his 'Fifth'. For apart from a literal quotation of the phrase "Qua resurget ex favilla / Iudicandus homo reus" from the "Lacrymosa" in the second movement of the symphony, almost all the themes of all four movements of the work refer to the Requiem.
For probably the first time ever, the world-famous Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Ádám Fischer, one of the most important conductors of our time, supported in the Mozart Requiem by an excellent quartet of soloists and the outstanding choir Ad Libitum, make it possible to hear this exciting connection by juxtaposing the two works in one concert.
Wolfgang Amadé Mozart (1756–1791)
Requiem in D minor, K. 626 (1791) [after the edition of Franz Xaver Süßmayr's (1766-1803) completion published in 1877 and edited by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)]
– Pause –
Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Symphony No. 5 in B flat major, WAB 105 (1875-76, rev. 1877-78)
Fenja Lukas | Soprano
Michaela Selinger | Mezzo-Soprano
João Terleira | Tenor
Alexandre Baldo | Bass
Chor Ad Libitum | Rehearsal: Heinz Ferlesch
The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment
Ádám Fischer | Conductor