One of the world’s great orchestras, the Vienna Philharmonic concludes this year’s triptych of ninth symphonies with the grandest of them all. Dedicated to God, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 is the extraordinary product of a career’s experience and a decade’s labour – an unfinished swansong that confronts darkness even as it grasps towards heaven in music the composer himself thought ‘the most beautiful I have ever written’. The concert opens with Berg’s Lulu Suite, a distillation of the composer’s tragic opera into a heady and sometimes violent outpouring for orchestra.
Franz Welser-Möst © Sebastian Fröhlich