Eugen Jochum in Bruckner

At the present time, there are four main pillars in my musical world: Bach, Handel, Schubert and Bruckner. This evening it was Bruckner's turn; the seventh symphony recorded in 1976 by Eugen Jochum conducting the Staatskapelle in Dresden. It is always dangerous to generalise as to who plays what, best. If you want Elgar, you have to have English players (what about Vasily Petrenko?) If you want Debussy, it needs to be French players. For Gershwin, you need Americans. For Rachmaninov, you have to have Russians. Etc. Generalisations are dangerous, and inaccurate more often than not. But I do wonder about Anton Bruckner. The great Bruckner interpreters all seem to be Germanic (starting with Furtwängler, the greatest Brucknerian of them all, in my opinion). And then, listening to the Dresden Staatskapelle, or the Berlin Philharmonic, or the Vienna Philharmonic, or the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in Bruckner; can you really imagine any other of that interpretive standard, speaking with their native language, as it were?

Bruckner seems to need a conductor steeped in the Germanic tradition. Furtwängler. Schuricht. Knappertsbusch. Jochum. Wand. Klemperer. Böhm, Kabasta, plus a few outsiders such as Haitink or Horenstein. He needs an orchestra steeped in the old German sound world. He needs a good, rich recording (which, alas, mitigates against many great Bruckner recordings of the past, including those by Furtwängler). I am happy usually to fall back on my Eugen Jochum recordings with the Dresden orchestra, despite many, many alternatives on my shelves. Headphones on, volume up.