Still Misunderstood Blomstedt conducts Bruckner 4 - heard by GEORGE BALCOMBE '... playing magic ...'

Bruckner's nine symphonies are now more or less one hundred and ten years old but, curiously, are still misunderstood as much as they were in his lifetime.

The composer was a well-known organist in Austria, and held two prestigious positions, one as organist and choral director in the Catholic Cathedral at Linz and the other in Vienna's most important chapel, the Hofkapelle.

Earlier in life, when thirteen and a half years old and his organist father died, the younger Bruckner had been given a place as choirboy in the Augustinian monastery of St Florian, near his home and only some ten miles from the city of Linz, where, aged twenty seven in 1855, he became Cathedral Organist.

Not long after this inauguration, Bruckner attended a course in harmony and counterpoint. It was run privately by Professor Sechter, who taught Bruckner partly in Vienna and partly by papers that Bruckner took back to Linz...

ANTON BRUCKNER

AUSTRIA

GERMANY