Bruckner’s Ninth

Anton Bruckner dedicated his Ninth Symphony to ‘my beloved God’. At the end of a lifetime’s spiritual striving, he poured both his unquenchable faith and his agonising doubts into one mighty final testament – and then died before he could complete it. But even in its unfinished form, it’s overwhelming, and there’s no more thoughtful interpreter than Robin Ticciati, a conductor who has a very special relationship with the LPO. First, though, Simon Keenlyside sets the mood with Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs: ‘Such a Truth, as ends all strife / Such a Life, as killeth death …’