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#bruckner24 Symphony #8 (1887)
BRUCKNER ORCHESTER LINZ · MARKUS POSCHNER
This Complete Versions Edition includes all versions published or to be published under the auspices of the Austrian National Library and the International Bruckner Society in the Neue Anton Bruckner Gesamtausgabe (The New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition).
Was it a sign of conductors’ general satisfaction with Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony or editorial foot-dragging, that the work’s original 1887 version wasn’t published and performed until 1972? It certainly was Hermann Levi’s dissatisfaction or at least discombobulation with it, so shortly after his very successful Munich performance of the Seventh, that made Bruckner revise the work in the first place. It is this elaborate, raw earlier version that Markus Poschner performs here, in the latest edition by Paul Hawkshaw for the New Anton Bruckner Complete Edition. More ornate, brassier, and with more economically employed woodwinds, this version doesn’t smoothen edges and doesn’t round corners: An interesting insight into emboldened Bruckner at his unadulterated self.
