Daniel Harding on Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony (11 min.)

In September 2018, Daniel Harding conducted Anton Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony with the Berliner Philharmoniker; a work which divides opinion, as the British conductor explains in this introduction: some consider it one of the composer’s most important creations, while others don’t know how to approach it. In the finale of the symphony, Bruckner pushed his mastery of counterpoint to the extreme. According to Harding, interpreters are required to carry out the most accurate analysis, a purely intuitive interpretation does not do justice to the music. In other passages the symphony speaks in an “Austrian dialect”, which is why Harding sees the work less in the tradition of Richard Wagner than of Franz Schubert.