Anton Bruckner with his Order of Franz Joseph medal (photograph by Otto Schmidt, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain).
A little less than a week ago, I wrote about the Brahms portion of Profil’s ten-CD release of Hans Knappertsbusch conducting music by Johannes Brahms and Anton Bruckner. At that time I confessed to having lost count of the number of recordings in my collection of different conductors performing the Brahms symphonies. That count is far more limited where the symphonies of Anton Bruckner are concerned, as is my account of any of that music at concert performances I have attended.
The same may be said of my interest in those symphonies. I went through the better part of my life with little interest in Bruckner’s writing, which I tended to dismiss as being as narrow in scope as it was long in duration. However, after I moved into a position of having to write about the music I experienced it in a more productive way, I found that two conductors served to guide me towards a better appreciation of that conductor. One of those conductors, Sergiu Celibidache, is now deceased; and I had to draw upon recordings of his performances. The other, Herbert Blomstedt, is still alive; and I had the good fortune to experience his impact in February of 2012 during one his visits to Davies Symphony Hall in his capacity as Conductor Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony.
Blomstedt’s selection was the fifth symphony in B-flat major. This was not a “first contact” experience, since I had first encountered the symphony on one of the recordings made by Wilhelm Furtwängler, compiled in the 107-CD collection Wilhelm Furtwängler: The Legacy. However, it was Blomstedt that prompted me to sit up and take notice; and, before I knew it, I was teetering on the edge of my seat! The positive energy that I poured into my Examiner.com account of Blomstedt’s performance managed to work its way across the Atlantic Ocean to Altenburg, Germany, the home of the querstand label, which had released an SACD box of all nine numbered symphonies by Bruckner, all taken from concert performances given by Blomstedt with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. By November of 2012 I had channeled my February enthusiasm into an Examiner.com article about that box set.
Since then my interest in these symphonies has grown with every listening opportunity that comes my way, either in concert or on recording. I have become more aware of decisions made involving Bruckner’s manuscripts, his own revisions, and the labors of well-informed editors. Considering how much scholarly attention has gone into creating critical editions of these symphonies, it is important to note that all of Knappertsbusch’s performances (including those recorded) were based on first published editions, even though critical editions were beginning to see publication during his lifetime.
Nevertheless, the music is in the performance, rather than the scholarship. In addition to the fifth symphony, the Profil collection includes the third in D minor, the fourth (“Romantic”) in E-flat major, the seventh in E major, the eighth in C minor, and the published three movements of the ninth in D minor. The earliest of the recordings is of the fourth with the Berlin Philharmonic (1944); and the latest is of the fifth with the Vienna Philharmonic (1956).
What is important about all of these recordings is that, whatever technical shortcomings there may have been in the audio equipment, Knappertsbusch had an uncanny knack for bringing clarity to Bruckner’s scores. Often, this was a manner of finding the right levels of balance for his full-throated homophonic passages. However, when the writing is polyphonic, Knappertsbusch knew how to draw attention to all of the multiple layers of activity. This new release could have been an excellent selection for those just becoming acquainted with Bruckner were it not for the fact that the accompanying booklet provides so little background material. Given my own background knowledge, I suspect that I shall be visiting all six of these CDs with considerable frequency.
On the other hand those who know their Bruckner also know that there is a somewhat contentious issue around the seventh symphony. Those readers should bear in mind that a spoiler is about to follow. Bruckner knew that Richard Wagner was dying when he began work on this symphony. He thus conceived of the second (Adagio) movement as a solemn memorial that would come to a climax depicting Wagner’s soul entering heaven (which appears in the score at rehearsal letter W). (Supposedly, Bruckner was working on this portion of the movement when he received word of Wagner’s death.) This is the only time in the entire symphony that Bruckner adds the percussion section to his instrumental resources, underscoring the climax with a single cymbal crash. There has been a fair amount of argument as to whether the use of those cymbals was over the top. However, since they were in the first published edition, they ring forth in all their glory on the Knappertsbusch recording!
No comments:
Post a Comment