SYMPHONY NO. 8

As a Wagnerian I always had an intimate relationship with Bruckner..... I have performed Bruckner over and over again, all his symphonies. (Karl Böhm in: Life Remembered) The fourth part of our Böhm-cycle presents Bruckner's Eighth as a studio production with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1971. This recording marks the beginning of a unique series of later Bruckner recordings with Karl Böhm from the 1970s. Apart from three recordings made in Dresden in 1936 and in spite of his 'intimate relationship with Bruckner', it was not until the 1970s that Böhm began to record the symphonies of his Austrian compatriot for radio and gramophone. The Eigth Symphony was followed by recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic as well as in 1977 by a live recording of the Seventh Symphony with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. The present CD shows Böhm confidently crafting this most wide-ranging of Bruckner's symphonies, not allowing it to stiffen into forbidding monumentality but dramatising it with a powerful forward impetus and a positively fiery tonal effect.