here - Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra

The first movement of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony suggests
the architecture of sonata form – three big themes are
exhibited, developed in a masterful way, and returned later
somehow fresher for the experience. At the beginning,
Bruckner approaches C minor from the odd perspective of
B-flat minor and then settles into a series of holding patterns
from which C minor is visible but not yet accessible. There
is a powerful stillness at the center of Bruckner’s music,
something for which Beethoven and even Wagner have
not prepared us. The development section, for example,
begins from a point of almost total silence and inertia, and
Bruckner generates momentum slowly. A number of big,
brassy climaxes merely collapse, as if from a loss of nerve.
After the last flare of chords, the music stops, leaving a few
desolate reminders of previous themes and the repeated
beat of the timpani. Bruckner called this the Totenuhr, the
clock in a room where someone is dying – a deathwatch.
Bruckner did not explain why he placed the powerful, driven
scherzo next, contrary to custom, and one cannot guess his
plan until he lays out the extraordinary expanse of an adagio
just before the finale. The scherzo, in the meantime, is brilliant
dance music of the most serious kind, achieved by ingenious
repetition and a bold use of color. The trio, in contrast,
is lyrical, tender, reflective, and delicately scored (Bruckner uses
the harp here and in the following Adagio for the only time in
his career).
The Viennese who sat spellbound by this great, noble
Adagio surely never looked at Bruckner the same way again.
They must have been shocked that this undistinguished
man, utterly at a loss in the world they so stylishly inhabited,
understood things which can not be put into words. Perhaps
this is the music Dr Adolf Exner, the rector of the University
of Vienna, had in mind, when, bestowing the honorary
doctorate on Bruckner in 1891, he said: