The Farewell, Part One

Berlín, sábado, 26 de mayo de 2018.

Philharmonie. Hans Abrahamsen: Three Pieces for Orchestra. Bruckner: Symphony No. 9. Berlin Philharmonic. Sir Simon Rattle, conductor

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All things eventually come to an end. Over the course of the next month, Sir Simon Rattle will mark the conclusion of his sixteen years as chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic with a series of concerts designed, it would seem, to provide an encapsulated overview of his tenure. Perhaps fittingly, the programmes will be skewed toward the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The oldest work will be Brahms’ First Symphony from 1876, but there will be no fewer than five world premières from younger composers. The remainder of the programmes will be filled with works for which Sir Simon has a particular affinity, or perhaps merely pieces that he wanted to take out for a final spin before saying goodbye to Berlin.

One of the more intriguing features of the farewell concerts was the chance to hear the four movement completion of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony. Bruckner, of course, left the finale incomplete when he died, but the precise level of incompleteness has fuelled nearly a century of scholarly debate. In performance, the three movement version has become the accepted standard – Bruckner’s own suggestion that the Te Deum be used in place of a final movement has never been taken seriously – but since the sketches of the finale were first published in 1934, the possibility of a four movement version has been a source of great temptation.

Over the past half century, there have been some fanciful completions, and several scholarly attempts to turn the sketches and notes into a performing version. Yet there has also been a tendency on the part of conductors to keep the finale at arms length from the rest of the work. In the 1980s, Eliahu Inbal recorded the Samale/Mazzuca reconstruction as a standalone piece, packaged on record not with its parent symphony, but as filler for his recording of the Fifth. A decade later, Nikolaus Harnoncourt presented the new Phillips edition of the fragments at a series of workshop concerts, filling in the missing sections with an explanatory lecture. The material was eventually released as a bonus disc with his recording of the three movement Ninth.

When Sir Simon performed the newly revised Samale-Phillips-Cohrs-Mazzuca completion as the fourth movement in a series of concerts with the Berlin Philharmonic in 2012, it seemed to grant the finale a kind of legitimacy, and the subsequent CD release from those concerts seemed intended to pave the way for mainstream acceptance. Yet the canonical three movement version continues to dominate. Sir Simon’s decision to programme the four movement version in the first of his farewell concerts thus acted as both a reiteration of his earlier claims for the finale, and a rare chance to hear one of the most frustrating and fascinating parts of Bruckner’s oeuvre.

The concert, however, started with the première of Hans Abrahamsen’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, a suite of engaging miniatures that were brief in duration but considerable larger in the scope of their imagination. Each piece bore a title that, at first glance, suggested a simple indication of tempo or mood, but often found itself slightly at odds with the music that emerged. The first, entitled ‘With a restless and painful expression’ certainly made good on its promise of restlessness – it was propelled by an unstoppable rhythm – but the painful expression was more difficult to locate amid the exuberant mallet-work and the gleeful momentum of the strings. Although modern in texture, it seemed a good-natured callback to the brief moment in the 1920s when the colliding forces of the machine age and the jazz age were starting to find their way into the stylistic language of orchestral composition.

The second and perhaps most fascinating piece, titled ‘Calmly moving’, was constructed entirely of high pitched sounds. Two violins, at the upper limit of their range, created a slightly dissonant bed onto which shards of high piano and celesta began to settle. The final piece, which lasted about as long as the first two combined, was an extended study in percussion – primarily shakers and mallets – that never quite settled into a predictable rhythm; beneath these irregular droplike sounds, the basses pulled back and forth creating a mood of subtle unease. It managed, in its brief span, to achieve an almost trancelike state before fading into silence.

After well-deserved applause for Mr Abrahamsen and the departure of the percussionists, the Bruckner began. From the opening bars, it was apparent that Sir Simon had no intention of belabouring the ‘misterioso’ mood specified in the heading of the first movement. He did not view Bruckner as a mystic operating at a distance from the musical culture of his time, but rather as the very embodiment of his time – a romantic at the summit of romanticism – and his reading of the opening movement went out of its way to locate the sensuous within the symphony’s forbidding grandeur. String themes were sculpted for maximum lustre, climactic sections were played with a excess of vigour, and the more inward, elusive passages were treated as mere interludes. At full speed and full volume – much of the symphony, indeed, seemed uncommonly loud, as though all of the dynamic markings had been increased by a factor of one – it was electrifying, but the obvious thrills were coloured by a passing suspicion that the reverent heart of the movement was becoming lost in the excitement.

The brass, all of whom delivered superb performances throughout the evening, were given a place of especial prominence. Bruckner often uses horns and trombones to impart depth and nobility to the full orchestra, but in the first movement their bright tone and dominant voice served to elevate them above whatever was going on in the strings and woodwinds. There were, indeed, moments when the force of the brass threatened to unbalance the intricacies of the orchestration, yet in the patient layering of the coda there emerged a titanic mass of sound that could not have been too far from the overpowering awe that Bruckner imagined.

There was no lack of momentum in the Scherzo, which opened with emphatic pizzicato and built to a ferocious statement from the full orchestra; however the trio, which can be one of the most disarmingly alien passages in all of Bruckner’s symphonies, proceeded with a lively pace and a gaiety of manner that sounded close to cursory. But in the third movement, everything came together. The violins were given the space to play with greater assertion and the full brass, mellowed somewhat with the addition of the Wagner tubas, were more tightly reined. Indeed, the flute rising above the cluster of Wagner tubas was perhaps the most lucid moment of the evening, although even the movement’s terrifying climax had a clarity largely absent from the first two movements; and without the pressure of making the end of the slow movement stand as the conclusion of the symphony, Sir Simon was able to take the quiet concluding section with greater drive, highlighting the melodic potential and downplaying the hushed tremolo of the violins.

The finale went a long way toward clarifying the interpretive choices that had dominated the earlier movements. Whether Sir Simon had been building to something all along, or whether he was simply conducting with the zeal of one intent on proving a point, the concluding movement was magnificent. The sustained tension in the strings, the triumphant blasts from the trumpets, and the insistent pulse that drove everything forward revealed what any Bruckner enthusiast would have already known: that had he lived, Bruckner would have created a finale worthy of the rest of the symphony. Even near the end, when Bruckner’s own sketches gave way to echoes of the first movement supplied by the reconstruction team, the performance held everything together. Whether or not the coda bears any relation to what Bruckner might have composed, the closing moments of the finale achieved a similar effect to the end of the Eighth, finding unexpected triumph at the end of a long journey through darkness and doubt.