Jansons Its Last Concert

The 2015 Munich concert year began at the end of January with two highlights: two performances of Bruckner's Sixth Sympho ny with Mariss Jansons conducting the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. The live recording, previously reserved exclusively for subscribers to the orchestra, is now being released on CD by BR-KLASSIK - an outstanding interpretation of one of the most important compositions in the Late Romantic symphonic repertoire. For a long time, Anton Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony (along with his Second) was regarded as something of a ‘poor relation’ in his immense symphonic oeuvre, even though the composer himself had moodily referred to it as his "boldest".

Based on Alexander Pushkin’s renowned but rather grim short story about human avarice and obsession this concert performance of The Queen of Spades brings the work to life. Renowned as a concert orchestra the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks has relished the opportunity of giving opera performances under conductors such as Rafael Kubelik and Leonard Bernstein. Thankfully chief conductor Mariss Jansons is upholding that tradition. In recent years it has become customary for many orchestras include a concert performance of an opera or an oratorio in its programme each season; a trend that I hope continues.

It's a tall order to compile the best classical music of the twentieth century, but EMI has selected its top 100 classics for this six-disc set, and it's difficult to argue with most of the choices. Without taking sides in the great ideological debates of the modern era – traditionalist vs. avant-garde, tonal vs. atonal, styles vs. schools, and so on – the label has picked the composers whose reputations seem most secure at the turn of the twenty-first century and has chosen representative excerpts of their music. Certainly, the titans of modernism are here, such as Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók, Dmitry Shostakovich, Sergey Prokofiev, Claude Debussy, and Benjamin Britten, to name just a few masters, but they don't cast such a large shadow that they eclipse either their more backward-looking predecessors or their more experimental successors.