Bruckner’s symphonies are among the highlights of symphonic music after Beethoven and represent an attempt to transfer the Wagnerian musical language into the symphonic genre. His Third Symphony will be performed by the JPO under the direction of conductor Robert Reimer.

Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 3

Janáček philharmonic Ostrava
Robert Reimer – conductor

Austrian composer Anton Bruckner was born in the same year as Bedřich Smetana, and this year we mark exactly 200 years since his birth. For a celebration of such a momentous anniversary, one can hardly imagine a more fitting performer than the German conductor Robert Reimer, who is the founder and artistic director of the Anton Bruckner Festival in Berlin. Bruckner completed his Third Symphony in August 1873 in Marienbad, from where he went directly to Bayreuth to present his new work to the adored Wagner. Wagner, who was busy building his festival theatre at the time, inspected the work and eventually, “over beer and tobacco”, was delighted to agree that Bruckner should dedicate his Third Symphony to him. However, the Vienna premiere of Bruckner’s massive work in 1874 was a disastrous failure, and the composer reworked the symphony several times over the next 16 years. Compared to the colossal size and untamed shape of the first version, which was intertwined with musical quotations from Wagner’s operas, the last shortened and much more restrained version from 1890 represents a completely different world. A world in which Bruckner’s explosive revolutionary ideas were forced to yield to the tastes of the public and critics of the time.