Bruckner: Symphony No. 6 by Eugen Jochum (2025 Remastered, Amsterdam 1980)

The Sixth Symphony, long kept apart from the concert repertory, has since regained the place that is rightly its own. It constitutes an important transition toward the masterpieces that are the last three. It is a work full of boldness, which its composer had dubbed “Die Keckste” (“the most impudent”). Its Adagio is one of Bruckner’s most moving pages, with Eugen Jochum taking all the time necessary to bring out the full range of its spiritual and human forces.

Bruckner’s name remains linked to that of Eugen Jochum, who was, alongside Furtwängler and Abendroth, one of the very great Brucknerians of the first half of the twentieth century. His public recordings at the head of the Concertgebouw Orchestra constitute an absolute summit of the Brucknerian repertory.

Overall, the spiritual and musical foundations of his personality lie at the confluence of two influences: the German Romantic tradition on the one hand, and his own musical education rooted in church music on the other. Eugen Jochum experienced his first musical emotions through the sonorities of the organ, an instrument that is essentially Brucknerian.

A critic once said of him that he was an archangel in formal dress. His great height, his silvery hair, his arms opened as if he wished to gather the musicians together in order to carry them to the highest summits of some musical Valhalla, indeed express the kindness and benevolence that were within him.