Listening to Bruckner's 7th, which I haven't heard in over a dozen years, not since my ex left and took Bruckner with him. It's the Jochum recording with the Dresden orchestra. Magnifique!While I once heard Bruckner on huge speakers with booming bass, I now listen on a Tivoli hi-fi, with its inbuilt sub-woofer, and seriously, the sound is decent.
Bruckner to me is spiritual strength. We boldly reach for what we desire, and we dance with it. No light New Age-y airy stuff here. Dense, an impenetrable storm of instruments at times, like an orchestra of mountain ranges with dangerous sloping rock and deep bottomless crevices that plunge into the depths of the earth, beyond human range. And towering storms that move in a musical mass over the peaks. And the clear endless sky that opens out to the universe. At the centre, the heart that sings, with such passion!
Bruckner doesn't uplift me so much as buttress me against the oncoming tides of difficulties in their manifest forms. I find Bruckner in my bones.
Tarkovsky, in Sokurov's 'Moscow Elegy,' which I watched last night, says, of film, but it could be any art, that it is "a serious, difficult art, with great sacrifices."Tarkovsky says, "It's you who must belong to the art, not vice versa."
Bruckner reminds me that we belong to life.
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ReplyDeleteComment by John F Walter on January 19, 2009 at 5:14pm
I grok Mahler, bliss out with Sibelius, and Bruckner´s symphonies for me feel like the closest thing to the id of the late Romantic splayed out with the solemnity of a fallen God. So this was a real gift, Brenda. I have a complete symphony collection of Bruckner I´m going to break out for the first time in years thanks to you, guapisima!