Bruckner's Symphony No. 9

Riccardo Chailly, conductor emeritus and former chief conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, rounds off the symphonic cycle marking Anton Bruckner’s 200th birthday with his enigmatic swansong, the Ninth Symphony – including the finale, which the latest scholarship has deemed complete.

Anton Bruckner’s symphonies are a pillar of the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s core repertoire. And they’re certainly in good hands with such an authority as Riccardo Chailly. He sees Bruckner as ‘a saint who constantly confronted the devil, a man of such piety that he dared to explore the darkness’. In the Ninth, darkness wins: Bruckner died before completing the work. The slow third movement is a dignified ‘farewell to life’, as Bruckner himself noted in the score. ‘It has to be the most beautiful thing I have ever written,’ he said of this moving Adagio. ‘It always grips me when I play it.’

A fascinating puzzle

Many fragments of the missing finale were found among Bruckner’s personal effects. And for more than a century, these made up a fascinating puzzle, yet no one could piece them together to form a convincing whole. But a team of musicologists changed all that in 2012. The performance version by Samale, Phillips, Cohrs and Mazzuca is astounding, and changes the symphony’s tragic character: after three dark movements, the last brings redemption. Performed here is the ‘SPCM’ version heard in J.A. Phillips’s most recent revision dating from 2021–22.