Anton Bruckner

After taking us to the peak of Richard Strauss's mountain in their first, highly praised GENUIN CD, and climbing and accelerating with the second New Year's Concert full of encores, the Dresden Philharmonic have really taken off this time, soaring to a heaven of symphonic dimensions. Bruckner’s 3rd Symphony in D minor offers a direct connection to higher spheres, not only through its references to spiritual works of Liszt and Haydn but also through its sound-masses moving along like clouds and its tumultuous brass thunderstorms. The qualities of the magically luminous Dresden winds come as much into their own as do the silky soft, yet also robust strings. The listener would perhaps rather not have to decide whether to keep on searching for yet another quotation from “Die Meistersinger” or “Tristan und Isolde” or to instead simply bathe in the sound of this music, in which madness and method exist as closely together as one can imagine. Programmatic and absolute, polka and memento mori – supernatural!

Classique Info
Read the French review on Classique Info, 25.07.2008.

Gramophone
"Solid playing"
Review on the magazine Gramophone by Richard Osborne, 9 / 2007