Manfred Honeck conducts Bruckner's Symphony No. 9

Bruckner's Symphony No. 9

Manfred Honeck rounds off the symphonic cycle marking Anton Bruckner’s 200th birthday with his enigmatic swansong, the Ninth Symphony – including the finale, which the latest scholarship has deemed complete.

Anton Bruckner’s symphonies are a pillar of the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s core repertoire. Bruckner died before completing his Ninth Symphony. The slow third movement is a dignified ‘farewell to life’, as Bruckner himself noted in the score. ‘It has to be the most beautiful thing I have ever written,’ he said of this moving Adagio. ‘It always grips me when I play it.’

A fascinating puzzle

Many fragments of the missing finale were found among Bruckner’s personal effects. And for more than a century, these made up a fascinating puzzle, yet no one could piece them together to form a convincing whole. But a team of musicologists changed all that in 2012. The performance version by Samale, Phillips, Cohrs and Mazzuca is astounding and changes the symphony’s tragic character: after three dark movements, the last brings redemption. Performed here is the ‘SPCM’ version heard in J.A. Phillips’s most recent revision dating from 2021–22.