Join us this Sunday as Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducts The Philadelphia Orchestra in a recorded program from late January, 2013 at Verizon Hall that features two composers who were not only contemporaries, but who actually met during the premiere of Tristan und Isolde in 1865, Richard Wagner and Anton Bruckner.
Wagner's tender Siegfried Idyll, a gift to his beloved Cosima on her 33rd birthday, a work of delicate beauty, is paired with the towering Symphony No. 7 of Anton Bruckner, a work that gave Bruckner the greatest popular and critical success of his lifetime. The brasses and strings of the glorious Philadelphia Orchestra certainly get a workout in this performance, which utilizes the 1954 revision of Leopold Nowak - reinstating the controversial cymbal crash at the end of the Adagio movement, about which Bruckner had expressed some early ambivalence.
The Orchestra had lost a very important figure in its august history the week before the initial broadcast of this concert in 2013 - Conductor Laureate Wolfgang Sawallisch, music director of the Philadelphians from 1993 to 2003. WRTI's Susan Lewis pays tribute to Maestro Sawallasch during intermission, and we'll also hear Yannick Nezet-Seguin speaking with Jim Cotter about the twisting path that led Yannick to his appreciation of Bruckner's music. The Philadelphia Orchestra in Concert, Sunday, May 18, 1 to 3 pm on WRTI. Listen on the air and on our all-classical web stream at wrti.org
More information, including program notes, on The Philadelphia Orchestra's website
Program:
WAGNER: Siegfried Idyll
BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 7 in E major
I. Allegro moderato
II. Adagio: Sehr feierlich und sehr langsam—
Moderato—Tempo I—Moderato—Tempo I
III. Scherzo: Sehr schnell—Trio: Etwas
langsamer—Scherzo da capo
IV. Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht schnell
