Carl Schuricht conducts the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra performing Bruckner’s Symphony No.9 in D Minor
Anton Bruckner was born in September 1824 in Austria. As a child he learned to play the organ, an instrument at which he became very proficient. After the death of his father in 1837 Bruckner was sent to an Augustinian monastery in Sankt Florian to become a choirboy. While there his studies included both the organ and violin. Between 1845 and 1855 he worked as a teacher and organist at the same monastery before being accepted as a student of the famous Vienna music theorist Simon Sechter. When Sechter died in 1868 Bruckner took up the post as teacher of music theory at the Vienna Conservatory.
Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 was written between 1893-1896 and was to be his last, the final movement remaining unfinished at point of his death in 1896. Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony is both unique and complex in style presenting the listener with many different patterns and themes, traits that can be found in nearly all of Bruckner’s Symphonies. Monumental in its form and design, a vast orchestral canvas and soundscape providing fertile ground for experimentation and harmonic counterpoint. It ranks as one of the most innovative symphonies to be composed in the 19th Century.
The conductor Carl Schuricht was born in Danzig, Poland in 1880. He displayed a talent for music at an early age, studying both the violin and piano from the age of six. At the age of twenty-two he won a Felix von Mendelssohn scholarship and went on to study with Engelbert Humperdink and Max Reger. With an interest in conducting he began to undertake tours in Germany. With the escalation of the war he fled to Switzerland in 1944 – from this time onwards and throughout the 1950s he went on to conduct throughout Switzerland and major festivals in Paris, Lucerne, Aix-en-Provence and Montreux. In 1956 he replaced Erich Kleiber to conduct the Vienna Philharmonic during their first tour of the USA.
There is a natural synergy with Carl Schuricht conducting The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in Bruckner’s 9th. Schuricht brings energy and urgency, brooding and intense in the delivery, a performance of pure conviction with natural understanding of the composition. With this performance of Bruckner’s 9th (along with Bruckner’s 8th) it is obvious to see why Carl Schuricht is now considered on of the greatest conductors of the 20th Century.
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