The Dutch conductor Bernard Haitink and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra enjoyed a long and intensive artistic collaboration, which came to an abrupt end with Haitink’s death in October 2021. BR-KLASSIK now presents outstanding and previously unreleased live recordings of their concerts from past years. This recording of Dvořák's Seventh Symphony documents a concert given in March 1981 in the Herkulessaal of the Munich Residenz. The Scherzo capriccioso is a studio recording, also from March 1981.

Following the success of Antonín Dvořák’s first visit to London in 1884, the London Philharmonic Society asked him to return the following year and to compose a new symphony for the occasion. It was an honourable request – after all, the London Philharmonic Society had commissioned Beethoven's Ninth Symphony six decades earlier! When Dvořák began sketching out the symphony on 13 December 1884, he was well aware of the high expectations involved – both his own and those of others. Most music critics and Dvořák biographers, however, have struggled with the interpretation of this exceptional piece. For example, it has been interpreted "politically" against the background of the growing German-Czech tensions of those years. But the existential power of the D minor Symphony – its anger, its expansive pessimism, i.e. its confessional character – may also derive from the biography and personality of its composer, which were probably far more complex, painful and problematic than any "Bohemian idyll" we might assume.