Symphony No. 9 in D Minor - IV - Finale

I am delighted to be able to share with you Bruckner's final masterpiece, his most ambitious and radical composition. It is a piece of great importance to him, yet one which he did not quite get time to finish, and to make matters worse, at the time of his death the score was not bound and his house not secure and the Viennese public could help themselves to sheets of the manuscript as souvenirs, some of it turning up years later in private collections. Fortunately the first two thirds of the orchestral score survives, and there are many earlier pre-orchestration drafts for most of the remainder and just rough sketches for the coda, so with painstaking work it is possible to put together an authentic reconstruction. I think the version you are about to hear is the most authentic yet, and with its toccata, chorale and fugue elements it is as suited to organ as it is to orchestra, it could be his own vast Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

This is a brand new organ transcription written in conjunction with a new version of the orchestral score which is premiered in London this month. Both are brought to us by Dr. John Phillips of Sydney, Australia. John is one of the team Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzucca who are well known for their exhaustive and lifelong work on researching and reconstructing this piece. Their approach is a strict musicological one, basing everything on evidence and not adding any new material which cannot be traced to Brucker's own. The previous SPCM version was published in 2012 and has become part of the standard repertoire of the Berlin Philharmonic. John's latest revision has minor improvements throughout, but is particularly noted for the reworking of the coda, which for the first time is based entirely on Bruckner's own sketches.

Continuation in comments to the left.