"Anton Bruckner's symphonies were a constant part of the repertoire for Mariss Jansons and the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks. The existing recordings - almost all the great Bruckner symphonies – are important documents of Jansons’ deep understanding of the works, and the high musical quality of the recordings also testifies to the long Bruckner tradition at the BRSO. Jansons followed Bruckner’s notes and markings with painstaking precision and listening to a recording with the score reveals again and again how closely the conductor studied these works with the musicians of his orchestra. To a certain extent, Bruckner reinvented the symphony. Unlike Liszt or Wagner, it was Bruckner and, somewhat later, Brahms who sought and found new methods of reviving the symphonic genre and developing it further. From the outset, Bruckner relied on the sound of the large orchestra rather than mixing the individual groups of instruments. Terraced dynamics, that is, the immediate juxtaposition of piano and forte without transition, was also something Bruckner derived from organ music. As a church musician, he had close contact with these and other elements of Baroque music, and they flowed into his symphonies. As far as dramaturgical development was concerned, he tended to favour Schubert; indeed, it was the organic continuation and alternating interconnection of themes Bruckner had learned from Schubert that also explains the unprecedented performance length of his symphonies."