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A year after the Bruckner bicentennial [1]
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Date: 2025-09-04
As I write this, the Kennedy Center is still called the Kennedy Center and William Gerlach is still scheduled to play Joseph Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto in E-flat major with the National Symphony Orchestra on April 10 and 11 of next year, in a concert that will also feature Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 in E major. Gianandrea Noseda is still slated to conduct both the Haydn and the Bruckner.
Whether any of that will still be true come April is anyone’s guess. Bruckner was one of Hitler’s favorite composers, but present day Nazis would rather hear Schubert’s Ave Maria and dance bizarrely as he waits for an ambulance to remove someone who just fainted. Somehow I’m more comfortable typing Hitler’s name than that other guy’s.
More recently, the chaos and turmoil at the Kennedy Center have depressed ticket sales. Though then again, tickets for a Bruckner concert might not sell out. Though then again, when the Detroit Symphony played Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony (with nothing else on the concert) I sat in a seat that I believe was the farthest away from the stage I have ever sat at Orchestra Hall.
If it wasn’t the farthest seat from the stage I’ve ever sat in, it was definitely the most uncomfortable. Fortunately, there were a few empty, more comfortable seats left, and I went to one of those at the first opportunity.
There was no intermission in that concert. In the upcoming concert, I’m guessing the plan is that trumpeter William Gerlach will play the Haydn with a pared down orchestra, then there will be an intermission.
During that intermission, workers will bring out more chairs, to accommodate more strings, maybe more woodwinds (at least two clarinets which Bruckner calls for but Haydn does not) and definitely more brass: more horns, plus horn players on Wagner tubas, plus trombones and regular tubas. And William Gerlach will go sit down next to two other trumpeters.
Because, you see, William Gerlach is the principal trumpeter of the National Symphony Orchestra. Phenomenal trumpeter, looks like a very young guy in his National Symphony musician profile. Surely he wouldn’t be offended if management tried to get Wynton Marsalis to play the trumpet solo in the Haydn. Then Gerlach can sit out the Haydn and prepare himself for Bruckner.
And Wynton Marsalis is, on paper, gettable by the National Symphony. He just played with the Lincoln Center Orchestra at the Kennedy Center three months ago. But would he want to commit himself to the Kennedy Center any more than he already has or is expected to? I wager that no, he wouldn’t.
Anyway, the reason I’m thinking about Bruckner is that today is a year to the day after his bicentennial. Not quite feeling in the mood for his Seventh Symphony today, I’d like a more mellow selection. Here’s his String Quintet in F major, which he wrote more or less about the same time he was working on his Seventh Symphony.
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It’s a natural choice for string orchestra, even though the Scherzo loses a bit of spontaneity and immediacy in the larger ensemble.
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Gerd Schaller has recorded his arrangement for full orchestra.
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