Bruckner Society of America

Scrapbook:

Photos and Scans

Several years ago when the Bruckner Society was re-activated, we noticed that most of our files regarding past business were lost to us. Once, when John Berky mentioned this online, an employee from the New York Public Library advised him that the library held a set of eight scrapbooks donated to them by a past Bruckner Society member.

During the eleven day Bruckner Symphony Cycle at Carnegie Hall (in January of 2017), he had the opportunity to finally look into the scrapbooks.

On Thursday, January 26th, board member Daniel Pennell and John Berky went to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center. For over five hours, they worked their way through eight large scrapbooks filled with concert program books and newspaper clippings.

While they did not uncover much in the way of Society documents, they did see that between the 1940s and the 1960's the Society was actively involved in the concert activity in this country and they were very surprised by the number of Bruckner performances that took place during this time.

There were the better-known performances by Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic and William Steinberg in Pittsburgh and Boston, but there were also performances of the Symphony No. 3 by Fritz Reiner and the Chicago Symphony, a Bruckner Fourth with Pierre Monteux conducting the San Francisco Symphony and Howard Mitchell conducting the National Symphony Orchestra in D.C.

But then there were the smaller metropolitan orchestras - the Rochester and Erie Philharmonics, the Birmingham, San Jose, Sacramento and New Haven Symphony Orchestras and numerous other performances that have been long forgotten. There were also choral performances from organizations both large and small.

Below are a number of photos and scans taken during the day. We concentrated on Society activities, but we also picked some interesting reviews and articles.

Clicking on an individual picture while enlarge the photo - as well as begin a slideshow progressing through all images contained on the page.

If you are interested in reading the articles, then it may be better to download the .zip file (here) as the images there are in higher resolution.