Bruckner's Ninth with Carl Schuricht

When I was fifteen or sixteen years old and staying in Paris, I walked to the Théâtre du Châtelet one evening to attend a concert of the music of Wagner and Bruckner (seventh symphony). Carl Schuricht conducted the Orchestre des Concerts Colonne. It must have been an Easter period, since the concert featured the Good Friday music from Parsifal. This was the very start of my love of the music of Wagner and Bruckner. My Bruckner repertoire centres on the seventh, eighth and ninth symphonies, and today I listened once again to the ninth, conducted in 1961 by the same Carl Schuricht of my youth, but this time with the Vienna Philharmonic.

I first made the acquaintance of Bruckner's ninth in the 1950s with a Vox LP recorded in 1953 with Jascha Horenstein conducting the Vienna Symphony Orchestra. Schuricht's VPO in 1961 was probably the same orchestra, and there is nothing quite like the old Vienna Philharmonic playing Bruckner. The music positively glows, with wonderful strings, brass and woodwind. The re-furbished sound by the EMI engineering team for this Schuricht re-issue captures the VPO sound perfectly. The combination of Bruckner's music, the VPO's playing and the sure-footed conducting of Schuricht, an old Bruckner hand, make listening to this performance a golden classic. The 1944 Berlin Philharmonic recording under Furtwängler (Pristine Audio) is another golden classic but, in the last resort, the VPO playing and the wonderfully re-furbished sound make Schuricht my first listening choice.