Accentus Music on Gramophone’s Top 10 Bruckner Recordings

The Gramophone Magazine has included two Accentus Music productions with Claudio Abbadoi and the LFO in its list of Top 10 Bruckner recordings.

Gramophone Magazine has published a list of Top 10 Bruckner Recordings. It includes the Bruckner 5 and the Bruckner 9 that were recorded live with Claudio Abbado and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra by Accentus Music. The Bruckner 5 has been released on DVD and Blu-ray by Accentus Music, and the Bruckner 9 was released on CD by Deutsche Grammophon and Accentus Music in 2014. This Ninth was the last concert that Abbado conducted before passing away in January 2014.

For the Bruckner 5, Rob Cohan states: "The sound is excellent, the camerawork sensitive and technically first-rate. Abbado himself is invariably the main focus of attention and he’s wonderful to watch: theatrical posing and outsize gestures are evidently foreign to his nature. What you see is clear cueing, a discernible beat and subtle facial responses.“

Richard Osborne writes about the Bruckner 9: "Abbado’s reading of the vast first movement is in time but not entirely of it. On occasion, the pulse hangs by a thread. Yet it is a thread that never breaks, like a life that has peaks yet to climb before it makes its quietus. All performances are unrepeatable but this is unrepeatable in a particular sense. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra was a unique assemblage of musicians to whom Abbado entrusted his thoughts and feelings about Bruckner’s anxious song of farewell. They in turn repaid him with playing of rare concentration and understanding.“