Music TipsListening tips from Bert van der Wolf
Jaap van Zweden: Bruckner, Symphony No. 6Jaap van Zweden Bruckner, Symphony No. 6
Bruckner called it his “cheekiest”: the Sixth with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra under Jaap van Zweden.
Listening tip from Bert van der Wolf
Anton Bruckner wrote his Sixth Symphony between 1879 and 1881. He himself called it his “cheekiest”. In the view of some historians, the motif at the beginning of the first movement goes back to an organ improvisation on a military signal in St. Florian. That is what the booklet reports.
For a long time the Sixth stood in the shadow of the other late symphonies. Whether Bruckner ever heard it complete is uncertain: in Vienna in 1883 only the two middle movements were performed. He dedicated the work to his Viennese landlord and his wife, in whose house he was allowed to live rent-free. The edition played here is that of Leopold Nowak.
The Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra plays under Jaap van Zweden, its chief conductor from 2005 to 2011. According to the booklet, the recording is part of a Bruckner cycle that the two recorded step by step. Bert van der Wolf recorded it in June 2012 in Studio MCO 5 in Hilversum.
Personnel
Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra
Jaap van Zweden, conductor
Column
Listening tips from Bert van der Wolf
Bert van der Wolf is a recording engineer (Tonmeister) and producer. He has run his own recording studio in the Netherlands since 1996 and owns the company behind the labels Turtle Records and The Spirit of Turtle. Audio Unscripted works with him: he chooses the albums, our editors introduce them. He produced these recordings himself; the high-resolution downloads are available from The Spirit of Turtle.
All listening tips →Details from The Spirit of Turtle and the booklet. Album page →