3 & 33

No. 333 of the ongoing ITYWLTMT series of audio montages can be found in our archives at https://archive.org/details/pcast332_202004

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This week’s Podcast montage finds its inspiration in our sequence number, 333, with a pair of symphonies – numbers 3 and 33 – from two composers we will be showcasing to some extent this year.

This year is Beethoven’s 250^th birthday, and we have already started a long Tuesday arc on his major works; I have two all-Beethoven montages planned for December. Suffice it to say, Beethoven isn’t on the program today.

In the next few weeks, I have quite a few Mozart titles in the works for our Friday series. This week, I am sharing one of a handful of his symphonies on this year’s programming.

Symphony No. 33 is the smallest of his late symphonies; the lightness of the work extends to the mood of the piece. In January of 1779, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart returned from a disheartening 16-month tour of Europe. He had been unable to achieve his goal of finding a new and more lucrative position, and he was still grieving the loss of his mother, who had died while he was away. Despite the disappointment one might expect the composer to have felt after such a disappointing period in his life, the symphony is a light-hearted and witty work.

His 31st symphony was a colorful three-movement work tailored for Parisian audiences, who didn’t receive it with as much enthusiasm as Mozart had hoped, and his 32nd symphony was an experiment at writing in the Italian style. Symphony No. 33 saw him return to a more Austro-German style; it was originally a three-movement work; the composer added the minuet movement for a mid-1780s performance in Vienna, where four-movement symphonies had become popular.

Another composer we will be exploring this year is Anton Bruckner– we already have shared his fifth and ninth symphonies in past years. . Two conductors will be relied upon in this year’s wave of Bruckner symphonies – Georg Tintner (from his Naxos cycle with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra) and Eugen Jochum who has at least two complete cycles of the Bruckner symphonies on record. This week’s choice, the Third, comes from his older set featuring him here with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra on Deutsche Grammophon.

Bruckner's Symphony No. 3 was dedicated to Richard Wagner and is sometimes known as his "Wagner Symphony". It was written in 1873, and like all of his symphonies, underwent several revisions - in 1877 and again in 1889. I believe Mr. Jochum uses the 1959 Nowak edition of the 1889 version. In this version, the Scherzo coda is removed and additional cuts are done in the first movement and the Finale.

The symphony has been described as "heroic" in nature. Bruckner's love for the grand and majestic is reflected especially in the first and last movements. The signal-like trombone thema, heard at the beginning after the two crescendo waves, constitutes a motto for the whole symphony. Stark contrasts, cuts and forcefulness mark the signature of the entire composition. Many typical elements of Bruckner’s later symphonies, such as the cyclical penetration of all movements and especially the apotheosis at the coda of the finale, which ends with the trombone thema, are heard in the Third for the first time.

I think you will love this music too.