Hans Knappertsbusch - Bruckner: Symphony No.5 (1956) Hi-Res

Bruckner never heard his Fifth Symphony. He attended the premieres of all his other completed symphonies, conducting the first three himself, but by the time the Fifth was nally performed in 1894, Bruckner was too ill to make the journey to Graz, and so he left it in the hands of his disciple, Franz Schalk. It was just as well that Bruckner stayed home, for, as he had recently begun to suspect, Schalk was a traitor as well as a disciple. The score Schalk introduced to the world that April in Graz was a travesty of Bruckner's original—it was extensively cut (some 222 measures were omitted from the finale alone) and virtually every measure that Schalk retained he altered in some small, but damaging way.

But by the 1890s, Bruckner began to see that serious damage had been done to his work. In 1892 or 1893, he packed all his manuscripts away in a trunk; the will he drew up the next year entrusted their safekeeping to the Vienna Court Library. According to the German conductor Carl Muck, Bruckner gave him a manuscript of his unfinished Ninth Symphony shortly before his death, asking him to take it out of Vienna, "so that nothing may happen to it." There were other signs of a silent rebellion: when it came time to authorize the edition of the Fourth Symphony that Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe had prepared for publication, Bruckner simply refused to sign the printer's copy.

Bruckner's triumph, ultimately, was a posthumous one, for it is only recently that scholarship and justice have joined forces and we are able to hear Bruckner's symphonies more or less in their definitive forms. It is not misleading to view October 20, 1935, as the rst performance of Bruckner's Fifth Symphony, for on that date—nearly sixty years after the score was completed and some forty years after the premiere in Graz—Bruckner's score was heard for the rst time in its original form.

Tracks:

1) Introduction (Adagio) — Allegro. B-flat major 18:48
2) Adagio. Sehr langsam. D minor 13:24
3) Scherzo. Molto vivace D minor 9:34
4) Finale (Adagio) — Allegro moderato. B-flat major 18:50

Personnel:

AHans Knappertsbusch
The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Recording Info: June 3-6, 1956 at Sofiensaal, Vienna