‘La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra’

‘When the good God calls me to him and asks “What did you do with the talents I gave you?”, I shall show him the score of my Te Deum, and then he will judge me mercifully.’ Bruckners Te Deum, ‘the pride of my life’, is a work conceived on a grand scale ‘for chorus, soloists and orchestra, with ad libitum organ’. In his personal copy of the score, Gustav Mahler crossed out this last direction and, with a dash of humour, replaced it with ‘for angels’ tongues, God-seekers, tormented hearts and souls cleansed by fire’. Bruckner’s ecstatic eulogy to God has a worthy match in the rarely performed Second Symphony, an extremely complex work of great depth and thematic wealth, which he himself nonetheless considered to be the most easily accessible to audiences and in which he achieved his ‘epic breadth’ for the first time. Hartmut Haenchen marks a new milestone in La Monnaie’s Bruckner cycle.