The Manchester Guardian Nr. 18483 bespricht auf S. 7, signiert "E. N.", das Konzert vom 2.11.1905 mit der 4. Symphonie:

"                      THE HALLÉ CONCERT.
                                PROGRAMME.
Fourth Symphony, in E flat, "The Romantic" . . . . Bruckner

[... Mendelssohn, Goldmark, Mozart, Liszt ...]

     The Bruckner Symphony last night lasted just over an hour, and left the audience very tired, very puzzled, and not a little bored. Here in England we have still to learn our Bruckner. In his own lifetime, in Vienna, his partisans set him up as a rival to Brahms, while the thoroughgoing Brahmsite, of course, took it to be a primary article of his creed to disparage Bruckner. He had a hard struggle to get a proper hearing at all. Dr. Richter produced this Fourth Symphony of his in Vienna in 1881; that was the first occasion on which a Bruckner symphony was given entire, previous conductors not having dared to venture on more than an occasional isolated movement. Since that day Germany has seen a considerable flow of intelligent opinion to the side of Bruckner, though his fame has not spread very much abroad. A curious example of the completeness of the English ignorance of him is to be seen in the new edition of Grove's Dictionary. The rulers of that enterprise are avowed partisans of Brahms, so that poor Bruckner gets short shrift. A bare catalogue of his works is given, the whole thing occupying about three-quarters of a column–just the space given to Madame Clara Butt.

     He is decididly not easy to understand, and one can forgive even good musicians who are not over-blessed with patience for dismissing him with a shrug and a kick. The last movement by the Fourth Symphony may unhesitatingly be scored off the slate. Bruckner is notoriously weak in his finales, and even his most intelligent admirers frankly admit the failure of the last movement of the Fourth Symphony. It is a wilderness of confused purposes and intentions unfulfilled; any time after the first three minutes of it one feels inclined to send the bellman out to cry a reward for the many lost and strayed ideas. But the first three movements are of another order. There no careful listener can doubt the presence of an extraordinary amount of real musical inspiration, even if he feels that much of it goes to waste. Whether it actually does or not is a question not to be hastily decided. We feel that we are listening to the conversation of a talker of genius who every now and them loses the thread of his subject, and meanders along till he recovers it again. But does he lose it, or is it merely we who, for some reason or other, cannot follow him? And if the latter is the real explanation, what in turn is the explanation of that–for criticism does not end but only begins when we have come to recognise a lack of ground common to ourselves and the artist? May the trouble not come from this–that bruckner is tracing a mental picture which every now and then ceases to be clear to us? It is evidently not absolute music; it is as evidently not music with a definite programme, like, say, "Till Eulenspiegel." Between the two stools both Bruckner and we come to the ground. He makes it quite plain to us for a moment that he is delineating some object of his phantasy; then there comes a moment when his phantasy functions behind a veil that we cannot see through; we lose sight of his picture, his story; and as the music is not purely self-existing, self-sufficing, we are left blindly questioning the meaning of it all. It is neither the absolute music of Brahms nor the programme music of Strauss, but something between the two; and it has the general infertility of the hybrid. Still, no one but a dogmatist will think he has got to the root of the Symphony after merely one performance. Anyone with a musical nerve in his system must have been struck with the wealth of beautiful poetic imagination it exhibits; one does well to remember, too, that musicians of the first rank, like Hugo Wolf, who knew his work well, had a passionate admiration for it. For my own part I feel that the essential key to the     understanding of it is a thorough comprehension of its poetic basis. I did not get much help in this respect from the rather poor note in last night's programme, the writer of which apparently knew the score well enough to make a decent technical analysis of it, but not well enough to see very profoundly into Bruckner's phantasy. The performance was presumably as good as the work could have. Dr. Richter obviously put the best of himself into it, and the orchestra played with the desperate conscientiousness that is born of sheer bewilderment.

     There was little in either the Mendelssohn or the Mozart concerto [... Kreisler ... Kritik an Mozart (nichts sagen mit Perfektion) ... kurze Notiz zum nächsten Konzert ...].

                                                                E. N."