Bruckner's Overture in G Minor

[Guest]

(Couldn't find an existing 'Sunday Morning' thread).
Was Rob Cowan being unduly modest when said that he wasn't sure he would have recognized the composer of the piece he played just after 0900 - or was he being unkind to Bruckner? I'm far from a Bruckner fan, but he certainly has his own 'sound' and I soon became convinced that he was indeed the composer concerned.

[Roehre]

(Couldn't find an existing 'Sunday Morning' thread).
Was Rob Cowan being unduly modest when said that he wasn't sure he would have recognized the composer of the piece he played just after 0900 - or was he being unkind to Bruckner? I'm far from a Bruckner fan, but he certainly has his own 'sound' and I soon became convinced that he was indeed the composer concerned.

I think Rob Cowan wasn't unduly modest. Though being a well crafted piece, the overture has too many fingerprints from other composers to be immediately recognized as Bruckner. Basically only the coda could be said to be a kind of "purely" brucknerian music - the rest is a mixture of Beethoven (Leonore overtures), Mendelssohn (Hebrides) and a bit of Schumann and early (i.e Tannhäuserian) Wagner with some very light brucknerian sauce.
It is contemporary with the Symphony in f-minor (no. 00 / "Study", 1863), and just slightly younger than the 3 Orchestersätze (1862) which are at best hardly (if at all) recognizable as Bruckner.

[Norfolk Born]

To be fair, I did toy with the idea of 'plumping' for Beethoven before the whole thing went on for too long, which made it more likely to be Bruckner (who, unlike Beethoven, didn't know when to stop. I find it very hard to imagine Bruckner even contemplating the sort of surprise ending that Beethoven sometimes indulged in).