Bruckner: Symphonies Nos

Since Sergiu Celibidache s appointment as their chief conductor in 1979, the Munich Philharmonic developed into one of the finest orchestras in the world. Their performances of Bruckner, in particular, were in a class of their own and where orchestra and conductor truly excelled. It is in the symphonies of Anton Bruckner that the grandeur of the music unfolds organically, its power innocent of all brutality, its monumentality issuing from stillness and austerity. Says Celibidache, "Every performance of a Bruckner symphony is a first performance, every rehearsal is a thousandfold NO designed to achieve a single YES."

Grammy-winning conductor Andris Nelsons and his "superb" (The Guardian) Gewandhausorchester Leipzig continue their acclaimed couplings of Bruckner symphonies and Wagner masterpieces with Symphony No. 6 and Symphony No. 9. The symphonies are accompanied by the Wagner's Prelude to his last complete opera, Parsifal, and the Siegfried Idyll.

In these priceless documents from the late 1970s, filmed in the Bruckner shrines of Vienna and St Florian, Herbert von Karajan conducts the Vienna Philharmonic in Bruckner's Eighth - the symphony he revered above all others - and Ninth, as well as the towering Te Deum. "Massive, glowing, and infused with cosmic power" (conductor/scholar Denis Stevens on Karajan's Bruckner Eighth filmed with the Vienna Philharmonic).

Andris Nelsons and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig conclude their award-winning Bruckner cycle. Starting in 2017 with Symphony No. 3, the cycle has received countless superlatives and garnered the 2017 Edison Klassiek Award. Each symphony has been considerately paired with music by Wagner. In this final instalment of the cycle, Nelsons complements Symphonies Nos. 1 & 5 with the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde".

Bruckner's music embodies the visions of a devout, ordinary man. Parts of his expansive, shimmering musical landscapes are influenced by Wagner, but one can also detect Schubert, who began life in similar circumstances. The reposeful piety which runs through Bruckner's symphonic spectrum lends his music its unique power of attraction.

The Bruckner recordings on this second volume of the Michael Gielen EDITION were made principally with the SWR Symphony Orchestra Baden-Baden and Freiburg. This enables the listener to follow the orchestra's development over the years, culminating in their outstanding 2013 performance of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony.

Since he hated recording, Sergiu Celibidache's Bruckner recordings enjoyed a certain limited critical reputation in the later years of the twentieth century because most of his performances were available only as pirated air checks with awful sound and atrocious surfaces…

Brought together here in four special volumes the Celibidache series celebrates the extraordinary legacy of his collaboration with the Müncher Philharmoniker portraying the excitement and atmosphere of their live performances. These recordings are unique to EMI Classics and were painstakingly mastered to retain and recreate the vibrancy and impact of Celibidache and the Müncher Philharmoniker’s live performances.

Warner Classics presents a box-set of Sergiu Celibidache's Bruckner recordings with Münchner Philharmoniker in Munich. These legendary performances are the summit of the Romanian conductor’s legacy, a true mystical experience for the listener!

All the Bruckner symphony recordings that Hans Rosbaud made for SDR (now SWR) are released here for the first time. Rosbaud took care over matters of interpretation, which took several decades to make their mark Rosbaud generally used the Haas and Nowas editions.