Governor Thomas Stelzer calls the Bruckner Orchestra (BOL) “our best ambassadors” and means not only the artistic but also the economic and tourist effects.
A business delegation accompanied him to the premiere concert, including the Lord Mayor of Düsseldorf, Stephan Keller, and Barbara Fasching, the Düsseldorf orchestra director from the Innviertel. Norbert Trawöger, as the artistic director of the Bruckner Orchestra, sees the collective as an inspiring performance in front of an international audience, which goes hand in hand with an increase in global renown.
He sees the BOL as the predestined ambassador for the Upper Austrian Anton Bruckner and the German tour as a harbinger of 2024, the anniversary year of one of the greatest composers in music history.
Artists and audiences missed feedback and interaction during the pandemic. The exchange between orchestras and musicians was missing in the Corona years. How helpful such contacts can be was shown when oboist Horst Eppendorf from the Cologne Gürzenich Orchestra spontaneously stood in for a sick BOL colleague at the premiere.
He had known the difficult Hartl composition, which will be presented on the tour with soloist Martin Grubinger, since it was written. He played it himself in the Bruckner Orchestra around 30 years ago.
Thousands of people in Düsseldorf, Essen, Cologne, Mannheim and Regensburg experience these vibrations together, feel overwhelmed by Bruckner’s powerful work at the same time, step into sound worlds that conductor Markus Poschner opens up and accompany Grubinger on the frontiers of modern music. Shared experience, simultaneous sensations as a connection between people from more than 20 nations. If that isn’t good news! Eve Hammer