WEll, I've been listening to the Kna 8 today and I've realized I must have been a bigger knucklehead in my youth than I am now. I really LIKE this performance now.
Hi Ralph. I enjoyed this review. I have an anecdote regarding my experience of Bruckner's music involving the mighty Kna.
It was the late 1960s, the beginning of my working life - I am now 72 and have had 93 jobs, most of which I hated - and I felt prompted by Gramophone to explore Bruckner. I bought the Istvan Kertesz 4th and liked it. Next I bought the Westminster Munich Kna 8th and tried and tried and tried and eventually gave up on the 8th. It took forever, a turgid stream of diversions into billabongs and dead-end lagoons. I bought the Karajan 9th and loved it, then the Reichardt 6th on Turnabout and thought it was okay.
Next came the 7th, the Schuricht Nonesuch, then the 2nd, once again on Turnabout and I was beginning to become a confirmed Brucknerian. The 8th however, continued to elude me. Then in 1978, I walked into a record shop where I had previously been the Classical Department Manager and music was blaring. I was transfixed. I asked my friend, Francis, What the f is this? He held up the cover - Eugen Jochum, Bruckner 8, Dresden Staatskapelle, The last movement, he said.
I now have 70 versions of this symphony and on the nights when I don't drink a bottle of wine and wrestle with inevitable insomnia, I catalog them in my head. It's more satisfying than counting sheep.
Yes, it IS the greatest symphony ever written...
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