Mariss Jansons, who passed away in 2019, is generally accounted as one of the contemporary era's great interpreters of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. He recorded them multiple times, with various orchestras, but these live performances, coming from the last decade and a half of his life, were made with the Sinfonieorchester des bayerischen Rundfunks, an orchestra he had plenty of time to mold. Several were already available when this box set appeared in 2020, but they would have been hard for buyers to assemble, and the ...
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Mariss Jansons, who passed away in 2019, is generally accounted as one of the contemporary era's great interpreters of the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. He recorded them multiple times, with various orchestras, but these live performances, coming from the last decade and a half of his life, were made with the Sinfonieorchester des bayerischen Rundfunks, an orchestra he had plenty of time to mold. Several were already available when this box set appeared in 2020, but they would have been hard for buyers to assemble, and the set, in six volumes, has been commercially successful. The sound engineering, from the Gasteig in Munich and the Musikverein in Vienna, is very good, although not quite on the level of Christian Thielemann's Musikverein recording of the Symphony No. 8 in C minor with the Vienna Philharmonic. A strong point throughout is that the live format plays to Jansons' strengths: his Bruckner readings are intense and forward-moving, following the pattern of his teacher Yevgeny Mravinsky. The...
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