Orchestre des Champs-Elysees, Philippe Herreweghe - Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 (2006)

A ‘poet in sound’: for Bruckner this was the noblest quality to which a composer could aspire. With the fourth (and probably most popular) of his symphonies, he marked himself out as Beethoven’s successor, while still remaining intellectually very close to Wagner. Bruckner himself described the work as a ‘Romantic Symphony’, notably because of its ambivalent swings between shadow and light; perhaps he also chose the name because it deals with Romanticism in art long after the end of the ‘official’ Romantic period.