Bruckner: Symphonies Nos. 1 & 9

Album review

In 2003, following a delicate operation for stomach cancer which won him a long remission, Claudio Abbado was able to realise his last dream, the creation of a "super-orchestra" made up of the greatest musicians of Old Europe. For ten years, that great Italian conductor would lead the Lucerne Festival Orchestra every summer, giving audiences some lovingly recorded and published performances that memorably included cycles of Bruckner and Mahler which have now entered into legend. We know how Abbado's illness allowed him to open the door of the great mystery of death, rendering his musical vision profoundly human, at once intimate and metaphysical. Published by the Lucerne Festival in a sober and stripped-down format, this edition offers the Alpha and Omega of Anton Bruckner's works. This is a way for Abbado to close his own story, because Bruckner's First Symphony was his very first collaboration with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1969. Taking inspiration from the founding idea of Ernest Ansermet, who wanted, in 1938, to create a temporary orchestra in Lucerne in order to provide summer work for musicians from the Orchestre de la Suisse romande, Abbado created a veritable musical utopia by bringing together musicians who were completely devoted to the pleasure of making music, with no hierarchy or frippery. The result was this miracle that we can see and hear today. This performance of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony was recorded on 23 August 2013: the last concert conducted by Abbado. Although much weakened, he seems to want to stretch out time to infinity, as if to stave off the fatal moment which would come just a few months after this farewell concert. This is a serene treatment, possessed of a great calm and inner peace that has nothing to do with religion, but rather with pure music. © François Hudry/Qobuz