Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich & Paavo Järvi

• Anton Bruckner (1824 - 1896): Symphony No. 7 in E Major, WAB 107:
• 1 Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E Major, WAB 107: I. Allegro moderato 21:20
• 2 Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E Major, WAB 107: II. Adagio. Sehr feierlich und sehr langsam 21:23
• 3 Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E Major, WAB 107: III. Scherzo. Sehr schnell - Trio. Etwas langsamer 09:38
• 4 Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E Major, WAB 107: IV. Finale. Bewegt, doch nicht schnell 12:29
• Total Runtime 01:04:50

Info for Bruckner: Symphony No. 7

The first performance of Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony at the Zurich Tonhalle took place on 14 January 1924, to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth. Under the direction of Walter, Furtwängler, Klemperer, Böhm and Karajan (to name but a few!), the orchestra has since given many performances of this monumental work which was its composer’s first great success and which the conductor Hermann Levi considered ‘the most significant composition since the death of Beethoven’. The orchestra’s Brucknerian tradition is perpetuated with this cycle conducted by its music director Paavo Järvi, which will continue with the Eighth and Ninth Symphonies until 2024, the year of Bruckner’s bicentenary.

Since January 2022, Paavo Järvi has been realising a Bruckner cycle with the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich that will run over several seasons. A look at the history by our dramaturge Ulrike Thiele shows how well this composer suits us.

From the beginning, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich felt committed to performing "novelties", i.e. contemporary music. At the time of the opening of the New Tonhalle in 1895, these were works by Johannes Brahms or Richard Strauss. The driving spirit was initially Friedrich Hegar, the first chief conductor of the Tonhalle Orchestra, who maintained the best contacts with the leading musicians and composers of the time. In January 1898, Strauss himself came to Zurich to conduct "Also sprach Zarathustra", among other works - the way Hegar "rehearsed the work, had the strings line up desk by desk, [...] that was the talk of the town at the time". (E. Isler, Neujahrsblatt 1935)

A special programmatic constant again goes back to Strauss, who performed Bruckner for the first time in 1903 as a guest performance with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, namely his Symphony No. 3.

Volkmar Andreae, who took over from Hegar as principal conductor in 1906, gave further Zurich premieres: Symphony No. 9 in 1907 and Symphony No. 4 in 1909. In the first decades, the Fourth and the Third were heard particularly often, followed by the Eighth and Seventh. With his numerous Bruckner performances, Andreae established the Bruckner tradition that extends to the present day and is now being continued with the Bruckner cycle by Paavo Järvi and the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich.

For our music director, Bruckner is a particularly good fit for the orchestra: "With its great classical-romantic tradition, the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich is ideally suited for Bruckner, this central composer for modern symphonic bodies. If Bruckner's music has always been dismissed as 'static' in the past, it is doing it an injustice. For this is above all a problem of interpretation. His music has the same merits, values and aspects of the symphonies of, say, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Beethoven. Bruckner is the natural continuation of this tradition. Even though the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich has often played Bruckner and I also conduct it, I am looking forward to discovering many new things together. And with Symphonies No. 4 and 7, there are two works at the beginning of this cycle that are rightly very popular: because they speak quite directly to us."

Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich
Paavo Järvi, conductor

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Booklet for Bruckner: Symphony No. 7