Barbican Hall
Symphony no.8 in C minor
(1890 version, ed. Nowak)
This was by any standards an
impressive performance, although it did not entirely fulfil my (perhaps
unreasonable) expectations. Bernard Haitink is and remains a master
Brucknerian, of course, but there were a very few occasions on which tension
flagged slightly, although that may have been more a matter of the edition than
the performance as such; the two are not straightforwardly disentangled.
Moreover, there were perhaps a few more orchestral fallibilities, particularly
falling off of phrases, than I might have expected from the LSO, even in so
notoriously exhausting a work for the players as this. The congested acoustic
of the Barbican certainly did not help either. Finally, I remain to be convinced
that this edition of the symphony presents Bruckner to his greatest advantage,
above all with respect to the cuts made. I am no fundamentalist about such
matters, nor am I a Bruckner scholar, and in general, a great performance can
salvage even the most corrupt of editions – think of Hans Knappertsbusch using Franz
Schalk in Bruckner’s Fifth! – but I could not help but regret that Haitink had
turned to Leopold Nowak from Robert Haas, however distinguished the company
Haitink may have joined.
Those reservations out of the
way, I can now describe what remained, as I said, an impressive performance. The
first movement opened and continued in admirably ‘direct’ fashion: facing ‘it’
in squarely, whatever ‘it’ may be. Those oases of not-quite-stasis, not unlike
and yet certainly not identical to Mahler’s later examples, offered remarkable
relative stillness. Haitink’s patience always paid off, not least in the build
up of apparently Wagnerian figures to distinctly un-Wagnerian ends. Apocalyptic
grandeur arose out of the notes rather than being applied to it from without.
The final subsiding was accomplished, like everything else, without
exaggeration and all the more powerful for it.
The scherzo was alert: full
of life, yet telling of death. Both Haitink and the LSO gave the sheer
strangeness of Bruckner’s harmony, often overlooked, its full due. Again, that
proper sense of the apocalyptic arose from the material. The trio brought with
it no metaphysical relaxation, its relative leisure no less disturbing. Indeed,
barely have I heard it so unsettling. Yet Haitink did not appear to ‘do’
anything with, let alone to, it; the effect, however much art this may conceal,
was of permitting the music to speak ‘for itself’.
The Adgaio opened with a sadness to great for words: again, the work’s
sadness, or so it seemed, not a ‘mere’ performance’s. It progressed with a
strength that pertained to both. Woodwind told of something different, of
something perhaps celestial, something both necessary and yet increasingly
difficult to attain; this was the orchestral section that impressed most
greatly of all. There was something monastic, in a far fuller sense than the
modern, ignorant caricature would have it, to those players’ contribution: a
last gasp of the Austrian Baroque, one might say. Strings consoled as they
could, but at what point did Bruckner take his leave, or threaten to do so,
from his God, or vice versa? That
remained an open question, for all the clichés one hears concerning such
matters. Silence, without a hint of theatrical prolongation, played its role
too, both dramatic and architectural. Towards the close, horns, despite
occasional slips, offered the innocence of an earlier German Romanticism:
infinitely touching.
The finale undoubtedly opened
with defiance. Unstable – especially in this edition? – progress seemed to rely
as much upon belief as anything else, though Haitink’s sense of the greater
picture could hardly be doubted. One does not, of course, expect the motivic
cohesion of Brahms in Bruckner; Bruckner’s very personal handling of form had
its own story to tell, and, despite the cuts, did so for the most part
admirably. Once again, though one could hear harmonic proximity to Wagner, one
felt all the more keenly how important were Bruckner’s purpose and method.
