Bruckner: Symphony No 4

The epithet ‘Romantic’ is Bruckner’s own, and although they may seem like programmatic wisdom after the event, the charming descriptions he gave to each of the movements of his Fourth Symphony while engaged on his several revisions of the work make quite clear what kind of Romanticism this is.

The program is of mediaeval towns flanked by enchanted woodland, knights and huntsmen, noonday dancing in forest clearings: such is the substance of that amiable early Romantic painter Schinkel rather than his awe-inducing contemporary Caspar David Friedrich (note that the heyday of both artists came nearly half a century before Bruckner began work on the Fourth Symphony in 1874). In other words, the moodier imaginings and the fantastical subjectivity of the artist we think of as the archetypal Romantic are nowhere in sight.

London Symphony Orchestra
Bernard Haitink, Conductor