Alemania
Bruckner 200Musikfest 4: Notable Firsts
Jesse Simon

As the weeks of Musikfest Berlin neared
their conclusion, the Vienna Philharmonic made a welcome visit to the stage of
the Philharmonie with Christian Thielemann as conductor. While the programme,
which paired the first (numbered) symphonies of Schumann and Bruckner, offered
none of the neglected masterworks, obscure composers or twentieth-century
rarities that often make Musikfest concerts so memorable, the performances on
this evening served as an eloquent reminder that sometimes the best concerts
can arise from the simple combination of familiar works, a superlative
orchestra, and a conductor with a strong vision for how the music should sound.
Certainly Schumann’s symphonies are as
familiar as it gets: along with Beethoven and Brahms, Schumann’s symphonic
output stands at the very centre of the nineteenth-century European repertoire,
and the countless recordings made in the last hundred years – not to mention
the frequent concert performances by orchestras all over the world – have
probably subjected the works to every interpretive approach imaginable and
teased out all the nuances in the process. The pleasure in this evening’s
performance of Schumann’s First thus came less from any grand
revelations than from the opportunity to hear the symphony in its fullest
glory.
Much of that glory came from the string
section. The first entry of the strings, answering the first movement’s opening
horn call, was electrifying in part for its decisive thrust, but even more so
for its luxuriant sonic breadth; and in the brisk Allegro that followed, the
playing remained delicate and detailed without sacrificing any of the
movement’s infectious momentum. If the strings were a source of awe throughout
the evening, it is not to suggest that the other sections were in any way
inferior: the woodwinds (especially the flutes) distinguished themselves
consistently, the brass were beautifully rounded (and, in the Bruckner,
judiciously weighted), and the timpanist added exactly the right heft to each
appearance. But it was the lustre of the strings that remained the evening’s
great constant.
Once one had accepted the infallible
balance of the orchestra, the attraction of the evening lay with the music
itself. There are few obvious links – in either style or temperament – between
Schumann and Bruckner, apart from the fact that they were both working within
the broad scope of mid-nineteenth-century orchestral tradition: the urbane and
erudite Schumann was fifteen years older than the far-less-worldly Bruckner,
and was already dead by the time the latter made his first forays into the
symphonic genre. Yet in Mr Thielemann’s pacing of Schumann’s opening Andante,
one could almost discern a foreshadowing of Brucknerian grandeur, while the
vigorous third movement seemed to offer a possible blueprint for Bruckner’s own
distinctive treatment of the Scherzo and Trio.
For the most part, however, Mr Thielemann
did not seem interested in highlighting potential connections between the
evening’s two works. Schumann’s symphony was played with a mixture of energy
and refinement that seemed perfectly suited to the work itself: if the rhythms
at the beginning of the first movement sounded somewhat rigid, the Allegro was
graceful and propulsive, building steadily towards an incandescent conclusion.
In the Larghetto the relaxed tempo was balanced by a subtle accentuation of the
delicate string and woodwind filigree that gives the movement its own internal
animation. The Scherzo and the first Trio, which followed the second movement
without pause, were notable for their stateliness – it was the only part of the
evening in which Mr Thielemann and the orchestra seemed to be holding back
– but the second trio was fleet and effervescent. The opening of the
finale was played with an arresting solemnity that appeared again in the
recurring dialogue between the sprightly woodwinds and the grave strings, but
it was the movement’s surrender to joyous celebration that brought the symphony
to its stirring conclusion.
One of the delights of the Bruckner
bicentennial has been the opportunity to hear many of the early and
lesser-performed works, often in performances of the highest quality. Earlier
this year Mr Thielemann lead the Berlin Philharmonic through revelatory readings
of the unnumbered F-minor and D-minor symphonies, and on this evening he guided
the Vienna Philharmonic – with whom he made his recent recording of the
eleven-symphony cycle – through an equally compelling performance of the First.
But if Mr Thielemann’s approach to the unnumbered symphonies revealed a
composer discovering the building blocks of his personal style, the First
demonstrated that, even from the very beginning, Bruckner’s self-contained
symphonic universe bore remarkably little resemblance to anything else.
Although Mr Thielemann performed the
considerably revised Vienna version of 1891 on this evening, it was nonetheless
tempting to imagine what the Linz audience of 1868 must have made of the
symphony’s ecstatic climaxes and terrifying brass intrusions. Certainly the
strength of the evening’s performance was that, despite the great refinement of
the orchestra, Mr Thielemann made few attempts to sand down the symphony’s
rough edges or try to make it fit the mould of mid-nineteenth-century
romanticism. After the cogent argumentation of Schumann’s symphony, the urgent
opening of the first movement and its initial grandly-scaled tutti sounded
almost wholly untamed. Yet there was nothing haphazard in Mr Thielemann’s
reading: he found a strong continuity running through the movement’s episodes,
and his tempi were consistently tailored to a deep understanding of its larger
structure.
The second movement – longer on mood than
melody – doesn’t achieve the same level of profundity as some of the later
slow movements, although a hushed passage for flute and timpani offered clear
views of the Bruckner to come. Yet the performance, with its endless streams of
beauty from the first violins, was unfailingly charming and, at certain moments,
something considerably more, with the final bars building to a climax of great
nobility. The final two movements – the Scherzo/Trio with its inexhaustible rhythmic
propulsion, and the Finale with its vaguely apocalyptic opening giving way to
an ecstatic conclusion – were perhaps the most conspicuously Brucknerian, and
both were rendered especially vivid by the orchestra’s finely balanced sound:
the fearsome strings, the deep concentration of the brass (from which the
trumpets were allowed to rise to the fore only in the triumphant final bars of
the finale), the detailed woodwinds and the sturdy foundation of the timpani
all conspired to create a sonic landscape ideally matched to Bruckner’s unique
vision.
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