A special conclusion to our Bruckner cycle
Order your tickets for our Bruckner cycle concert on 6 February
Order your tickets for our concerts on 7 and 9 February
Swan song
With the ink on his Eighth Symphony barely dry, Anton Bruckner began work on his Ninth Symphony in D minor on 21 September 1887. Initially, not much was put on paper; the composer was mainly busy revising earlier symphonies. It was not until April 1891 that the Ninth surfaced again.
Partly because his health was now failing, he feared that he would no longer be able to complete the work and wrote “May death not take this pen from my hand before that”. However, his premonition came true and the Ninth became Bruckner’s Unfinished: the composer died on 11 October 1896, before he could complete the Finale.
Still much preserved
It became clear during the course of the twentieth century, however, that a considerable amount of material from the Finale had survived: both the exposition and the development are reasonably complete. According to musicologists, less than a fifth of the final movement is missing. A meticulous reconstruction of the Finale would do Bruckner more justice than the symphonic torso we usually are presented with.
The SPCM version
One of the specialists entrusted with this task is the Australian musicologist John A. Phillips. It took him decades, in collaboration with several colleagues, to master Bruckner’s style and grammar and to reconstruct the final movement as faithfully as possible. Phillips and his associates continued to endlessly polish and refine the material from 1983 onwards, until the first version of the Finale was published in 2012, named SPCM in reference to the surnames of the responsible musicologists: Samale, Phillips, Cohrs and Mazzuca. In the spirit of Bruckner (who left multiple versions of various symphonies), this was not the end of the story: the Finale was revised in 2021/22 to incorporate the latest insights. This is also the version that Honeck is conducting at the concerts on 6, 7 and 9 February.
Riccardo Chailly has unfortunately had to cancel his performances with the Concertgebouw Orchestra due to illness. We are very grateful to Manfred Honeck for agreeing to step in at short notice. Ticket holders have been informed by email about this programme change.
Would you like to know more about Bruckner’s Ninth? Listen to the podcast about this symphony. (in Dutch only)