What’s in a number?

When listening to the symphonies of Mozart, Beethoven or Schumann, one is left with the sense that each work is a discrete entity written according to a series of broadly-accepted guidelines but essentially individual in character. Bruckner’s symphonies, while nominally adhering to the same formal rules and structural principles, suggest something else entirely: for Bruckner, the symphony seems to have been less a form than an ideal – a holy mountain impossible to scale but equally impossible to ignore – and from the Third onwards, each symphony can be heard as a refinement of its immediate predecessor, and another step on the path to his singular vision.

If the four symphonies that pre-date the Third are performed less frequently it may be because the visionary qualities of those later works are still very much in a formative state; and…