20 October 2007

My favourite conductors

My favourite conductors list is quite long: Furtwangler, Wand, Fricsay, Sinopoli, Celibidache, van Beinum and Monteux..... Maybe there are some I forget to mention in this list. Oh yes, Asahina for his Bruckner recordings only.

They all have their special aura.

It takes a lot of time and effort to collect their recorded output, and then listen to them.

19 October 2007

My favourite composer

Anton Bruckner is my favourite composer.

Getting to know him or his music is a steep learning curve. His life has long been tarnished by people's stereotyped perception, both contemporarily or posthumously, and it takes time to find out the 'truth' about it.

His music has so many versions and editions, which can be confusing.

There have been thousands of recording of his music. I'm a collector of his recordings, and although I have in my collection more than a thousand CDs of his music, I can only call myself a small-scale collector. The one big known collector is John F Berky (www.abruckner.com).

If you're a follower of the late Sergiu Celibidache, you know the importance of live music rather than recorded music. I'm lucky enough to have attended quite a few great Brucknerians' concerts, like Gunter Wand, Takashi Asahina.

As this is my first post, I'll keep it short, and reserve my views on many facets of Bruckner's music to later posts.