Peter Schenkman writes:

>Anyone looking for Bruckner Symphonies (sixth or most of the others) would
>be well advised to have a listen to Celibidache whose recordings of most of
>the them can be found (in different performances) on DG and more recently
>on EMI.  In a word, mesmerizing.

Well advised is right--if only because both Celibidache and the
Munich Philharmonic considered themselves, quite justifiably, Bruckner
specialists.  Celi originally learned his Bruckner from Furtwaengler--not
a bad school.  In his relatively short postwar innings conducting the
Berlin Philharmonic, and then in his seventeen years here in Munich, he
and his bands thought out and then played _real_ Bruckner.  Real, because
they not only knew the music but also were naturally equipped to intuit its
historical context.  And though Munich's a bit further geographically from
Bruckner's own Linz than is Vienna, in mentality it's probably a great deal
closer.Both towns are focal points of an agrarian hinterland that's very
southern German--not like Vienna, which was always cosmopolitan.  Celi and
his Muencheners were the most practiced and credible Brucknerites around.
Next to them I'd put Wand, especially when guest-conducting the Munich
band, and the Bamberger Symphoniker, a first-rate ochesra than came ro
Bavaria from the (now-)Cezch Sudetenland, just after WWII.  The Bamberger
are also in the Bruckner tradition because they stem approximately from
Bruckner country, right next door to his own back yard in Upper Austria.
To be sure, the geographical and cultural affinities don't necessarily
define music, but they most emphatically spur involvement in the music on
the apart of indigene players.  And interest has a way of paying off.

But, like Deryk Barker, there are those who find Celi's Bruckner --and not
his Bruckner, alone-- "stultifying." His Wagner tended to be that because
Celi read a lot of German Romantic pomp and circumstance into the symphonic
music--especially the slow parts.  But Bruckner was no heaven-stromer like
Wagner, he was more of a highly gifted and somewhat bibulous monastery
organist.  Playing him "stultifyingly", with the slow majesty of organ
tones, strikes me as as the right way, not wayward.

Denis Fodor