Bruckner’s symphonies are among the pinnacles of symphonic composition after Beethoven and represent an attempt to transfer Wagner’s musical language into the symphonic genre. The Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava will perform his Third Symphony under the direction of conductor Robert Reimer.

Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 3 in D minor

Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 5: Adagietto

Samuel Barber
Adagio for Strings

Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava
Robert Reimer – conductor

Austrian composer Anton Bruckner was born in the same year as Bedřich Smetana, and this year marks the bicentenary of his birth. To celebrate such a significant anniversary, it is hard to imagine a more suitable interpreter than the German conductor Robert Reimer, founder and artistic director of the Anton Bruckner Festival in Berlin.

Bruckner completed his Third Symphony in August 1873 in Mariánské Lázně, from where he went directly to Bayreuth to present it to his adored Wagner. Wagner, who was busy at the time with the construction of his festival theater, reviewed the work and eventually, “over beer and tobacco,” happily agreed for Bruckner to dedicate his Third Symphony to him. However, the Viennese premiere of the extensive work in 1874 was a disastrous failure, and the composer revised the symphony several times over the next 16 years. Compared to the colossal dimensions and unbridled form of the first version, which was interwoven with musical quotes from Wagner’s operas, the final shortened and considerably more restrained version from 1890 represents a completely different world. A world in which Bruckner’s explosive revolutionary ideas had to yield to the contemporary tastes of the audience and critics.