Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony is one of his best loved. An evocation of the Austrian countryside, Bruckner wrote in a letter to a friend, the author Paul Heyse, ‘In the first movement of the ‘Romantic’ Fourth Symphony the intention is to depict the horn that proclaims the day from the town hall! Then life goes on; in the second subject the theme is the song of the great tit Zizipe. 2nd movement: song, prayer, serenade. 3rd: hunt and in the Trio how a barrel-organ plays during the midday meal in the forest.’ Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, the first in his final trilogy of symphonies, composed almost a century earlier completes the programme.







