The bravado of a cymbal clash doesn't work in concert halls and recording studios, especially where conductors have been adding a spurious cymbal clash at the climax of the Adagio of Bruckner's Seventh Symphony for more than a century. Why a cymbal clash? So audiences will know when the 22-minute movement reaches its climax. Not so for Günter Wand ...
How old is Günter Wand and the Berlin Philharmonic's recording of Bruckner's Symphony No. 9? Six years? Sixty years? Six hundred years? Six hundred million years? Although the sound quality of the recording is vivid and immediate, the performance itself sounds like it was born when the world was born, as if it were formed from molten rock and ...
This radio performance is one of those that transmits, from another era to our own, some of what audiences found vital in an earlier day. The music was recorded in 1968 at the studios of the West German Radio in Cologne, but, as the compelling booklet notes convey, its performance style was rooted in the years after World War II. It was then, ...
Günter Wand, the distinguished German conductor, and Emil Gilels, the renowned Russian pianist, only played together on one occasion, and, needless to say, they played Beethoven. Wand, although perhaps best known in America for his Bruckner, was in Europe and Japan also known for his Beethoven, while Gilels, of course, was internationally ...
A great performance of Bruckner's Ninth Symphony should be a spiritual experience as much as a musical experience. It should ignite the musicians and incinerate the audience. It should blaze with a prophecy of eternal damnation and burn with a vision of infinite redemption. It should devastate, consume, and annihilate, then, in the final bars, it ...
Despite his long and fruitful performing career with the Munich Philharmonic, Günter Wand's recordings with this orchestra were held back from the public while he was still alive, to avoid competing against his major label releases with other ensembles, such as the Cologne Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic. In Volume 3 in Profil ...
"Your favorite Western composer is Mozart?" Conway asked. "That is so," the High Lama replied. "Mozart has an austere elegance which we find very satisfying. He builds a house that is neither too big not too little, and he furnishes it in perfect taste."So wrote James Hilton in Lost Horizons and it's as true now as it was in 1933. Okay, so the ...
At the forefront of Bruckner interpreters, Günter Wand developed a performing style for the symphonies that may be regarded as sufficiently exacting for the sake of structure, yet expansive enough to communicate the deep spirituality that is essential to the music. The Symphony No. 5 in B flat major is one of Bruckner's most moving documents, and ...
Volume 5 of Profil's Günter Wand Edition is devoted to Carl Orff's massive and enormously popular cantata, Carmina Burana, in a stirring radio performance presented with the NDR Sinfonieorchester in 1984. In musical terms, this is a fine rendition, with controlled solos from soprano Maria Venuti, tenor Ulf Kenklies, and baritone Peter Binder; well ...
Of all the releases in Hänssler's Günter Wand-Edition, this may be the most significant. It's not that the other releases have been in negligible, but they have to a large extent duplicated repertoire Wand had recorded commercially. Not so this disc: of the five works here, only one had been previously recorded by Wand. Even more importantly, two ...
Günter Wand, one of West Germany's most passionate advocates for contemporary music, was appointed director of the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester in Cologne in 1945, and he immediately set the orchestra on a course of performing newly written music, as well as music that had been banned under the Nazis. This CD includes four modern ...
In mid-September 2001, five months before his death, Günter Wand conducted his final three concerts with the Munich Philharmonic, and included Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 4 in E flat major, "Romantic," on the program. Volume 4 in Profil's collection, Günter Wand and the Munich Philharmonic -- the label's second series devoted to the conductor -- ...
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