Conducted by Gianandrea Noseda with the BBC Philharmonic. I. Largo - Allegro Con Fuoco - 00:00 II. Scherzo - Allegro Ma Non Troppo - 19:39 III. Largo - 34:08 IV. Allegro Moderato - 47:12 "Much the same could be said about the Sixth Symphony, which further weakens the argument that Brahms's compositional struggles had a deleterious effect on Rufinatscha. Indeed if there is one composer to whom Rufinatscha seems significantly indebted here it is Schubert. The time scale of the symphony feels Schubertian, and there are passages -- most strikingly the central trio section of the Scherzo -- that do sound rather like Schubert: the Austrian rural Ländlercharacter, and some of the harmonic shifts, has definite Schubertian overtones. But how much of Schubert's large scale music could Rufinatscha actually have known in 1865? Performances of the notoriously challenging Great C major Symphony were still far from frequent in the 1860s. The Unfinished Symphony had its Viennese world prem! iere in December 1865, though that would surely have been too late for it to leave any mark on Rufinatscha's Sixth. His knowledge of the symphonic Schubert must have been based on the youthful and decidedly classical symphonies Nos 1-- 6. As for posterity, the haunting woodwind and horns exchanges at the start of the trio make one wonder if Bruckner ever saw the score (Rufinatscha's expansive approach to musical form also suggests a kinship) -- but again, when would Bruckner have had the opportunity? He ...
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