Posted by Dale Phelps on August 29, 2002 at 09:59:29:
Some of you might have read my brief request for info about the unfinished finale for Bruckner's Ninth Symphony, this work is on my orchestras program plan for this year and our director was considering using the sketches of the fourth movement in performance instead of the TeDeum. Here's what I've learned so far:
There are two realizations of Bruckner's sketches for the 9th Symphony finale, one by "2 guys from Italy" (Sacco and Venzetti?), and the other by William Carragan, who is probably the world's foremost Bruckner scholar. Carragan is especially well-known in Bruckner circles for having made the performing edition of #2 as well as having written several authoritative articles about the genesis-es (is that the plural?) of the many editions of the other symphonies.
The director got hold of Carragan and apparently his version has not been played since 1991. He wants to revise it somewhat for our performance and will not charge us anything! Pretty cool, he's apparently a retired physics professor and having never been to the Bay area is planning to attend our performance!
I'm hoping to beat the bushes a bit for the largest string section we can muster for this event--and all the requisite publicity. This would be a Northern California premiere of the 4-movement Bruckner 9th, and somebody out there ought to be interested.
I hope you can all share my excitement about this. Now if we can just get a cheap tremolo machine...