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Ivor Bolton, the internationally acclaimed conductor from England, starts a new Bruckner cycle with this recording, featuring the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, whose chief conductor he became in 2004.

Ivor Bolton
Chefdirigent · Chief Conductor

Versatile, internationally acclaimed English conductor Ivor Bolton is just at home in the opera world as he is on the concert stage. His broad repertoire ranges from baroque to contemporary masterpieces. Bolton studied at Cambridge University, the Royal College of Music and at the National Opera Studio in London. He was the musical director of the Glyndebourne Touring Opera from 1992–1997 and principle conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from 1994–1996. He was appointed principle conductor of the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg in September 2004.

Ivor Bolton is a frequent guest at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich. His productions of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea and Orfeo, Handel’s Xerxes, Giulio Cesare and Ariodante and Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice received sensational praise from both audiences and critics. In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Bavarian Theatre Prize.

Ivor Bolton debuted at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden in 1995 with the premiere of Alexander Goehr’s Arianna. In 2000, he celebrated a major success with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg in a production of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride at the Salzburg Festival, to which he has often returned. As a celebrated conductor of baroque, classic and modern operas, he has appeared in Bologna, Buenos Aires, Sydney, San Francisco, Paris, Florence, Lisbon, Brussels, Leipzig and Geneva. His performances of Gluck, Mozart and Britten at Glyndebourne have won great acclamation.

Bolton has also conducted such major symphony orchestras as the London Symphony, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, BBC Symphony, the London Mozart Players, Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and the major American orchestras in Houston and Montreal. In 2000, he conducted Bach’s St. John Passion at a London Proms concert, repeating this work at the 2000 Munich Festival. During the 2003/04 season, Bolton conducted concerts in the Mozarteum Orchestra’s subscription series and at the Salzburger Kulturvereinigung, presenting compositions of the Viennese Classic, a premiere by Wimberger as well as works by Britten and Bruckner.

With the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, he has recorded the Salzburg Festival production of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, Mozart’s Mass in C Minor, Prague Symphony and Symphony No. 40, K. 550 in the series “Mozart in Salzburg” for OehmsClassics.

Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 5

Josef Anton Bruckner began writing his Symphony No. 5 on February 14, 1875. After completing it in May, he did take a closer look at it later; a revision dated January 1878 adds a bass tuba to the orchestration. But Bruckner didn’t hear his work in this form, however, until nine years later in a version for piano fourhands. (At the orchestral premiere on April 8, 1894 in Graz, Franz Schalk made formal as well as instrumental changes, even shortening the Finale by 122 measures!)

As an expression of Bruckner’s own inner complexity – he himself called it his ‘fanciful’ symphony – it is certainly a riddle; to some extent an intellectual exercise, almost abstractly linear. With its relationship to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, this work is the most clearly analogous to any model Bruckner ever used. At the same time, he simplified it consciously. Its cornerstone movements are in the tonic; the inner movements in D minor.

Bruckner harked back to classical tradition at the beginning of the work by employing a slow introduction. In accord with his religiosity, he let this introduction be interpreted as the “portal to a church”. Contrabass pizzicati suggest footsteps in an eternally wide space; lonely strings steal in with a canon and remain mystically in the dark. A fanfare penetrates the silence; rising unison throughout the orchestra over a G-sharp. The brass answers with a third, chorale-like motive. After its repetition a third higher, the music moves to its inevitable climax, rhythmically shortened and increasing in tempo, finally returning to the starting Adagio.

One may be able to hear Bruckner’s existential angst (expressed in his correspondence at the time) in this music. The second theme of the first movement, in F minor, is a passionate lament – Bruckner requests the first violins to play the G-string “fort und fort” (). Almost immediately after the beginning of the development, a new, distressing depression breaks through: a painful cantilena begging for redemption. The beginning of the Adagio, a simple A-B-A-B-A with coda, can be interpreted as an expression of lonely abandonment, as Bruckner’s sad circumstances when he wrote this work. Pizzicato triplets in the strings are at odds with the duplets sung by the oboe – a “sad tune” reminiscent of Wagner’s Tristan, which had immensely influenced Bruckner?

Only one single time did Bruckner press a Scherzo into sonata-form “en miniature” (with the first eight bars of the string accompaniment identical to the first four of the previous movement as well). The woodwinds present the main theme as a block – not without an element of humorless persiflage – followed by a much slower, complicated passage built of four dance-like, simultaneously played lines, contradicted by a taut third theme.

The thoroughly metric structure of the final movement, with its intentional rigidity, may re- flect Bruckner’s problems with the academic career he so desired at the University of Vienna. Driven by the idea of teaching counterpoint, he wanted to prove to himself and the rest of the world the kind of humanistic work he was capable of. Unique in the history of symphonic music, this movement shows Bruckner’s absolute mastery of formal thinking and technical ability in a union of sonataform and fugue with two subjects.

The 30 introductory measures build the key number: every section begins with a multiple. The beginning of the first movement summarizes previous events, with the clarinet playing the unmistakable octave leap from the beginning of the first theme. After reminiscences of preceding movements, the fugue subject begins to build: fortissimo entrances in the strings frame the exposition. Partial phrases create contrast; woodwind chords provide accentuation until dotted-eighths lead to further symphonic events. The lyrical melodic fabric of the second section is immediately handled, although not as a fugue. After passionate, escalating waves of sound, the second fugue subject – a derivation of the first – is played by the unison winds at the third section.

At this point comes Bruckner’s contrapuntal masterpiece: the wide-ranging double fugue which combines technical perfection with dramatic power. Finally, the main theme, in long note values, joins together with the expanded chorale in the brass to form a supreme, final apotheosis.



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