Progress was still slow until his death in 1896 when the final movement was still incomplete. Today it is performed either with the three complete movements, or with a finale of the Te Deum.

Bruckner was a strange fellow. He once walked past a church and heard the organ playing a tune he had just composed. He rushed in in alarm thinking he had plagiarised it, only to be told that the organist had heard him composing it on his piano when he walked passed his house a few minutes before. He was a neurotic counter of numbers and objects. Following a disastrous fire at a Vienna Theatre, he was seen walking the pavements counting the bodies – there were over 400 of them.

Review

The Thurston Connection/ English Music for Clarinet and Piano

NICHOLAS COX has now been principal clarinet of the RLPO for 20 years. On a new CD he plays three works associated with Frederick Thurston and two commissioned by Cox himself. Thurston was an outstanding musician during the period up to the end of the Second World War.

Accompanied by Ian Buckle at the piano, Cox plays Sonatas by Roger Fiske and Arnold Bax and Three Nocturnes by Ian Hamilton, all premiered by Thurston. Then there are two works written for Cox himself, Richard Rodney Bennett’s Duo Concertante and Paraphrase on Bird of Paradise by Hugh Wood. Wood was born in Parbold in 1932 and was for some years a professor at Liverpool University before settling in Cambridge.

Nicholas Cox has written his own programme notes for this release, which was recorded at Potton Hall, Suffolk, and released by the British Music Society.