Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 Honeck Pittsburgh

REFERENCE RECORDINGS® proudly presents Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, in a new interpretation from conductor Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. It is coupled with the first recording of Mason Bates’ Resurrexit, which was composed in 2018 on a commission from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Maestro Honeck. This album was recorded live in 2022 in beautiful and historic Heinz Hall, home of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, in superb audiophile sound.

REFERENCE RECORDINGS® proudly presents Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, in a new interpretation from conductor Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. It is coupled with the first recording of Mason Bates’ Resurrexit, which was composed in 2018 on a commission from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Maestro Honeck. This album was recorded live in 2022 in beautiful and historic Heinz Hall, home of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, in superb audiophile sound.

REFERENCE RECORDINGS® proudly presents Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7, in a new interpretation from conductor Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. It is coupled with the first recording of Mason Bates’ Resurrexit, which was composed in 2018 on a commission from the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra to celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Maestro Honeck. This album was recorded live in 2022 in beautiful and historic Heinz Hall, home of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, in superb audiophile sound.

Few conductors turn in tightly controlled and coherent renditions of Gustav Mahler's sprawling Symphony No. 7 in E minor, "Song of the Night," and it often comes across either as a jumble of ironic distortions or as a strange riddle that needs to be deciphered.
It would hardly seem as direct and powerful as its predecessor, the Symphony No. 6 in A minor, "Tragic," which most conductors take at face value and Few conductors turn in tightly controlled and coherent renditions of Gustav Mahler's sprawling Symphony No. 7 in E minor, "Song of the Night," and it often comes across either as a jumble of ironic distortions or as a strange riddle that needs to be deciphered.

The Bamberger Symphoniker's collaboration with Tudor has evolved in cycles. It began with Joachim Raff's œuvre, a pioneering step into overlooked repertoire. Then stepped up to the Greats with Schubert's symphonies: the first recording to follow the new Schubert edition was enthusiastically hailed as a refreshing new departure interpreted with historical awareness. Reaching for the stars under the aegis of Jonathan Nott, the scores of Gustav Mahler then entered the Bamberg Konzerthalle. That whole cycle has won countless prizes and awards, becoming a milestone of Mahler discography. The next step? Staying in Vienna with symphonies by Johannes Brahms while remaining true to Gustav Mahler's Bohemian homeland with Antonín Dvorák.

Valentin Silvestrov’s elusive post-modern style is rich in nostalgia for the lost music of a barely remembered past filled with beauty and spiritual aspiration. "Ode to a Nightingale is a masterly response to Keats’ unsentimental reflection on human mortality, contrasting with the beauty and affecting intimacy of the Cantata No. 4 and the resonant emotional world of its companion piece, the Concertino. Starkness set against elegiac melancholy are the shared features of Moments of Poetry and Music and the Seventh Symphony—an embodiment of Silvestrov’s dual musical nature of anguish and tenderness.

Second Symphony is also a youthful work – the composer was just 21 at the time – but it differs from the First in that it’s cast in a single movement. After the premiere in 1973 Aho decided to rework the middle section, a task he didn’t attempt until 1995. The result is a compact, tightly structured piece – it’s a triple fugue – which the composer candidly admits was intended as an antidote to some of the more ‘difficult’ music of the 1960s.

André Previn was always a great conductor of Russian repertoire and was especially known for his recordings of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Prokofiev. His 1973 recording of the Rachmaninov “Second Symphony” was important in establishing that work in the central repertoire and increasing the reputation of the composer himself. These are his mid-1970’s recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra recorded just one and four years after the Rachmaninov. He re-recorded all three works between Philips and Telarc in the late 1980’s with the Los Angeles Philharmonic but this recording is still his best.

Conducting Bruckner, says Rattle, is a lifelong quest for some "extraordinary vista, some wonderful moment which leads you out of this world". This certainly rings true for Bruckner's Seventh Symphony, the opening theme for which is said to have come to him in a dream, played by an angel. This huge, glowing mountain-range of sound is all at once majestic, reverent and terrifying. This edition of the symphony by Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs was first performed by the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Simon Rattle in September 2022, and the recording completes a set of three albums which also features Cohrs' editions of Bruckner's Fourth and Sixth symphonies. Making use of Bruckner's discarded fragments and lesser-known material through his many revisions, this set of albums is a must-listen for lovers of Bruckner's music, and gives us a glimpse into the composer's untold musical thoughts.

In Anton Bruckner’s 7th Symphony, the listener encounters a music characterized by great spaciousness and profound solemnity, a music which speaks of grief and lamentation, but also of their transcendence. With its monumental architecture and intensity of sound, the symphony has moved listeners ever since its triumphal premiere in 1884. The Guardian calls Daniel Barenboim’s London interpretation “Tremendous … Barenboim and the Staatskapelle seem to have this work in their systems, and the overall impression was of music unfolding organically at its own pace rather than of a work being self-consciously interpreted or led.”