In Wednesday’s (7/13) Wall Street Journal, Barrymore Laurence Scherer writes, “Say the name Anton Bruckner, and majestic instrumental sonorities blaze across one’s mind—emotional gestures against a backdrop of trembling strings, great motto-like themes of Wagnerian brass, rhythmic motifs weighty and satisfying. … But this week’s series of four concerts by the Cleveland Orchestra at the Lincoln Center Festival represents the first time Bruckner’s music has been paired in depth with that of John Adams, one of America’s supreme composers. Wednesday’s opening program juxtaposes Mr. Adams’s Dantean ‘Guide to Strange Places’ with Bruckner’s brooding, tragic Symphony No. 5 in B-flat. On Thursday, the Adams Violin Concerto (with soloist Leila Josefowicz) will be followed by the 1883 edition of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 in E (containing the composer’s tribute to his recently deceased idol, Richard Wagner). … The programs were the idea of the orchestra’s music director, the Austrian-born Franz Welser-Möst, who will be conducting them. … Though we tend to characterize Bruckner’s style as full-blown late Romanticism, Mr. Welser-Möst provocatively observes that ‘Bruckner is also a Minimalist. He and Adams build many of their large structures out of little motifs that repeat, grow and evolve over long stretches of time.’ ”
Posted July 13, 2011
