Almost a hundred years separates the works performed at this concert. Both composers left their homes in Vienna to travel to Upper Austria, where they would write new chapters in the history of the symphony. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, on a journey from Salzburg back to Vienna, arrived in Linz, where he was required „to give an academy at the theatre“. „And since I had not a single symphony with me, I made great haste to write a new one“, as he described to his father the curious circumstances of the composition of his „Linz“ symphony.
On 4th August 1881 Anton Bruckner travelled from Vienna to his former workplace in St. Florian, where he not only spent a relaxing holiday, in the course of which he visited „a people's fair and the associated exhibition“, but also completed his 6th Symphony. Although he was able to hear the whole work during a trial for a prospective member of the Vienna Philharmonic on 6th October 1882, he undertook no revisions of the symphony, which the musicologist Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen described as a „miracle of control and concentration“; this was the first of his symphonies not to undergo revisions, a procedure only repeated with the subsequent 7th Symphony.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791)
Symphony No.36 („Linzer“) in C major, KV 425 (1783)
– Pause –
Anton Bruckner (1824–1896)
Symphony No. 6 in A major WAB 106 (1879–81)
Munich Philharmonic
Valerij Gergiev | Conductor
