Paths to Bruckner

When we first started working with Enoch zu Guttenberg in 1996, he had established himself among the broad public particularly as the charismatic leader of the Chorgemeinschaft Neubeuern with his interpretations of Bach’s oratorios. Consequently, our first corporate recording in 1997 was Bach’s Christmas Oratorio – in a new theological and musical adaption by Guttenberg, which to this day has not lost any of its tension. However, together with the KlangVerwaltung Orchestra, which had been founded at the time, Guttenberg has also been working on new concepts for the romantic symphonic repertoire. From the very beginning, the main focus of this collaboration was the work of Anton Bruckner.

Bruckner’s lifelong analysis of the catholic theology, his portrayal of nature and men, his harsh transitions between deep depression and ecstasy, his central focus of the relation between God and men – these are matters that are of great importance to Guttenberg, and which could experience a new dimension by being translated into his language of sound.

Sometimes, the production of a CD can take quite a while: Our plans of recording the “Fourth” went back to at least half a decade. Over these years, Guttenberg’s version of the Fourth Symphony has gone through a continuous development.

With this work, Bruckner sets out on a romantic journey. It is essential to translate his descriptions into images and associations of high dimensionality and luminosity. Images of rays behind foggy mountains, the hunt, the nature and environment of men, and time and again the diminutiveness of these men before nature and hence, before God. We try to express these images by means of sounds, notes, phrasings, and timbres, and bring them to life in the heads of the audience.

With a high consistency, Bruckner develops and conjures these images from but one single central musical building block – the motif of the descending fifth – from the very first moment of the symphony to every single movement. We follow him from the sunrise into the night, from towering summits to the desperately begging choral, from the illusion of a happy liaison back to the mourning of a lonesome human being – always by means of a plastic phrasing and in search of descriptive timbres, which sometimes come surprisingly close to Gustav Mahler’s music, but also conjure up St John Passion, not only in the last movement.

In the symphony’s finale buildup, Bruckner returns with the question of the mortal man about the truth of God, possibly from the majestic nature into the majestic halls of a cathedral. Enoch zu Guttenberg poses this question at the place where this music sounded for the very first time: for him, the long journey of the search for Bruckner’s truth found its answer on April 26th2007 in the magical halls of Vienna’s Musikverein.

Felix Gargerle
Producer - FARAO classics