I first listened to Bruckner's symphonies as a teenager. I liked them a lot. I'd go listen to them at the symphony when they programmed them. But they didn't really stick with me in a long term way.
Fast forward 25 years to the pandemic and I'm holed up in my dark basement office, binge-listening various things. Julian Bream. Itzhak Perlman. And Bruckner. Four or five years ago I picked up a CD of his 9th symphony from the library's sale rack. And was like, yeah, this is good. So I picked up a box set (Gunter Wand), and started listening to them, a lot.
Two years later, here is my ordering. I'm leaving out 00 and die nullte:
- 2: an unconventional choice; nobody puts 2 first. But I love the pauses, the melodies, the understatement compared to the later symphonies.
- 4: I love the horn and this symphony has my favourite horn lines out of all of them. The first movement might be my favourite individual movement of any of his symphonies.
- 7: chills. This one is probably the most consistent in terms of the quality of the individual movements.
- 8: this one, as the kids say, goes hard, especially the last movement
- 9: a lot of people put this first, and I get it: the vastness and scope, the audacious dedication to God; but it was never properly completed
- 6: feels a lot like Johan De Meij cribbed from the end of the first movement for the end of the last movement ("Hobbits") of his Lord of the Rings symphony for wind band
- 5: takes a very, very long time to get to the point
- 3: dull
- 1: with the exception of Mahler, who inverts the principle, composers' first symphonies tend to be kind of bad, definitely true for Bruckner