Program booklet for the event
Bruckner's symphonies in their original sound
Unbounded
After completing the String Quintet in F major, Anton Bruckner began work on the Symphony No. 6 in A major in August 1879, which he completed on 3 September 1881, one day before his 57th birthday, in St. Florian, where he had travelled at the beginning of August and from where he also went to Linz to visit "the folk festival associated with an exhibition". Although he was able to hear the symphony at a rehearsal of the Vienna Philharmonic on 6 October 1882, at which, as he wrote to his friend Leopold Hofmeyr in Steyr, the musicians "applauded vigorously and took a shower", only the middle movements were premiered in Vienna on 11 February 1883, which is why Bruckner did not revise the work. The fact that the entire symphony was not played in public until after his death seems all the more astonishing because, for all its diversity of form, it is a true "miracle of control and concentration".
A similarly boundary-crossing piece experimenting with various compositional techniques of cyclical unification is the three-movement Symphony in D minor written between 1886 and 1888 by César Franck, who, like Bruckner, was a famous organist and was regarded in France as a successor to Ludwig van Beethoven, whose phrase from the String Quartet No. 16 in F major, underpinned with the question "Must it be?", he made the motivic nucleus of his masterpiece.
With this fascinating programme, the renowned original sound ensemble Les Musiciens du Louvre, in its 43rd year of existence, turns for the first time to one of Bruckner's symphonies, with which its founder and director Marc Minkowski, as a sought-after and celebrated guest conductor of orchestras playing on modern instruments, has been intensively engaged for some time now.
César Franck (1822–1890)
Symphony in D minor, FWV 48 (1886-88)
– Intermission –
Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Symphony No 6 in A major, WAB 106 (1879-81)
Les Musiciens du Louvre
Marc Minkowski | Conductor