The Bruckner Orchester Linz, which looks back upon more than 200 years of history and tradition and officially adopted its current name in 1967, has developed into one of the leading orchestras in central Europe during recent decades. The members of BOL constitute not only the symphony orchestra of the state of upper Austria, but also the featured orchestra for musical productions at the State Theatre in Linz. Its home is the Musiktheater building, opened in 2013, one of the most modern theatre buildings in Europe. The orchestra presents concerts at the International Bruckner Festival in Linz, concert cycles at the Brucknerhaus, and the ‘Grand Concert Night’ at the Ars Electronica Festival.

As an ambassador of upper Austria and of its namesake, the BOL appears regularly on international stages. During recent years it toured the USA, Japan and numerous European countries. During its history, the orchestra has been led by guest conductors such as Clemens Krauss, Hans Knappertsbusch, Sergiu Celibidache, Kurt Eichhorn, Václav Neumann and Christoph von Dohnányi, and more recently by Zubin Mehta, Serge Baudo, Horst Stein, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Michael Gielen, Bernhard Klee, Steven Sloane, Stanislaw Skrowaczewksi, Michael Schønwandt and Franz Welser-Möst; its style was shaped by chief conductors such as Theodor Guschlbauer, Manfred Mayrhofer, Martin Sieghart and Dennis Russell Davies.

Since Markus Poschner became its chief conductor in the autumn of 2017, this orchestra has been undergoing an unprecedented process of opening toward the outside, generating many new concert formats, seeking out unexpected performance places, finding surprising pathways in education, and first and foremost offering artistic events which meet with high resonance from audience and press due to their immediacy and intensity. Markus Poschner and the BOL are exploring their very own version of the music of the orchestra’s namesake, rendering it in an unmistakable, upper Austrian musical dialect, most recently manifested in a benchmark recording of the Eighth Symphony. Since 2012 the Bruckner Orchester Linz has had its own concert cycle at Vienna’s Musikverein; from 2020, this was joined by another cycle at the Brucknerhaus in Linz. The BOL was honoured with the “Best Orchestra of the Year” award at the 2020 Austrian Musical Theatre Awards.

Son of an eminent music critic in Vienna, Korngold showed great precocity and impressed even Mahler by his abilities. He had his first public success as an 11-year-old, with a ballet staged at the Vienna Court Opera. He moved to America at the invitation of Max Reinhardt in 1934 and made a career there as a film composer, returning after the war to his original métier as a composer for the concert hall but unable to regain a place in the opera house in a changed world.

Operas

Korngold won success in 1916 with his operas Violanta and The Ring of Polycrates. Still more successful was the opera Die tote Stadt (‘The Dead City’) first staged on the same evening in Hamburg and Cologne in 1920. The work is a dream-story, suggesting the work of Maeterlinck or Edgar Allan Poe, haunted by ideas of death. The opera was internationally successful and has recently been revived.

Orchestral Music

Korngold’s Violin Concerto, eventually written after the war, as the demands of Hollywood diminished, is Romantic in style and popular among performers since its first public rendition by Heifetz in 1947.

Film Music

The music that Korngold wrote for the cinema has a distinction of its own, apart from the films for which it was written, and on occasions provided him with material for later use in another context.

Instrumental and Chamber Music

Korngold wrote his First Piano Sonata at the age of 12, adding a second soon after, with a third in 1930. The greater part of his chamber music was written before he left Germany.