At “The Big Bruckner Weekend” in the Glasshouse International Centre for Music in the northeastern English city of Gateshead, four orchestras, two choirs, a couple of solo singers and a chamber ensemble marked the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth with performances of his last three symphonies, Mass No. 3 and String Quintet.
Any one of those works is a lot of Bruckner: The shortest of them, the quintet, runs 45 minutes, give or take; the longest, the Eighth Symphony, lasts about an hour and a half. Hearing all of them in two days requires a level of devotion comparable to Bruckner’s own deep religiosity.
The Guardian’s Flora Willson, in her review of the event, writes that “there’s no escaping the challenges of [Bruckner’s] music, as well as its pleasures. I don’t just mean its marathon duration. While these are all pieces from the XXL rail of the classical wardrobe, most of us would sit for longer through films, plays, operas or sports matches. Unlike any of those, though, Bruckner’s works don’t have in-built narratives to carry you along.”
Gateshead’s program did not feature the Te Deum, the work that I would rate as the most concise (less than half an hour) distillation of what this composer sought to express in his music. If you’re a Bruckner-curious newcomer, or zoned out during one of the symphonies, try this:
Letter V 