Bruckner 8 Rattle and LSO - Barbican Thursday and Radio Three

[Beef Oven!]

Sure, it will help to make up for all the times the 1 minute pause between movements of Messiaen's "Et expecto ressurectionum mortuorum" and the 2 minute pause between the first and second movements of Mahler's 2nd have not been observed.

I'm an accomplice on the Messiaen, but I always have at least a 2 minutes in between the first and second movements of Mahler 2.

[teamsaint]

Is it ok to have a 4 hour pause between the first and second movements? I have completely distracted myself and I'm going out for lunch soon.

did you try reversing the order of the middle two courses?

[Beef Oven!]

did you try reversing the order of the middle two courses?

I only had three courses.

[Maclintick]

Fascinating knockabout re editions of Bruckner 8. These are important, of course, in realms of academe uninhabited by the majority of Bruckner enthusiasts, & amongst those whose livelihoods depend on research bursaries & on the overturning of current ideas — I don’t say “conventional wisdom” since that phrase has pejorative connotations & panders to a contemporary predisposition to accept unquestioningly anything which purports to overturn the obviously erroneous ideas of the past, which by definition MUST be wrong. This leaves mere Bruckner devotees struggling. Haas or Nowak ? It seems a Bruckner Neuer Ausgabe is urgently needed. FWIW, as one whose admiration for this composer was cemented in the Simpson/Cooke era, it seems unlikely that they would have ignored the not-so-well-hidden antisemitism in Haas’s dubious anti-Schalk bias, especially since many of their colleagues & musical associates were jewish Austrian or German refugees fleeing Nazism — Hans Keller, Paul Hamburger, Bertholdt Goldschmidt inter alia ! But, Waldo makes a persuasive case.


Having just caught up with this on I-Player, the LSO played their socks off for Sir Simon, but IMHO there was a total lack of mystery in the result which is surely attributable to the dry Barbican acoustic — notes plopping onto the platform like so many dead halibut, where they should have been magically suspended in mid-air…

[waldo]

[FONT=Verdana]FWIW, as one whose admiration for this composer was cemented in the Simpson/Cooke era, it seems unlikely that they would have ignored the not-so-well-hidden antisemitism in Haas’s dubious anti-Schalk bias, especially since many of their colleagues & musical associates were jewish Austrian or German refugees fleeing Nazism — Hans Keller, Paul Hamburger, Bertholdt Goldschmidt inter alia !........

Cooke, I presume, took what might be called a strictly professional view of Haas, i.e. he considered only the musicological contributions of Haas, and ignored his unpleasant politics. Haas, in his view, made a momentous contribution to Bruckner scholarship. Before him, there was a monstrous tangle of error-ridden, spurious editions - mostly the work of Shalk etc. Haas was responsible for producing the first editions that were based entirely on Bruckner's own scores. They are virtually indistinguishable from the later Nowaks (except for the 8th). What Nowak offered, in addition to confirming Haas's own work, was editions of Bruckner manuscripts containing later revisions: Haas had tended to produce "definitive" editions based on first manuscripts.

It seems pretty clear, in fact, that Shalk et al did sometimes meddle with Bruckner's scores without his permission or even knowledge, so I can quite understand Cooke's appreciation for Haas's work in this regard. It is not necessary, therefore, to intrepret Haas's editions as being, in any meaningful way, connected to his anti-semitism. Haas was only doing what any other good editor would do: sticking to Bruckner's own manuscripts and rightly dismissing the later Shalk accretions. That fact that Haas may have thought of his work as part of a wide Nazi project to "purify" the Aryan culture is, perhaps, neither here nor there.

Indeed, in "The Bruckner Problem" (1975), Cooke seems to regret the fact that Haas was deposed from his position at the International Bruckner Society before the Bruckner problem itself could be definitively laid to rest: "This happy ending was promptly annulled by fresh confusion. In 1945, for non-musical (political) reasons, Haas was deposed......"

All of which seems fair enough. But even Cooke admits that Haas was responsible for at least one highly controversial decision and this pertains to the 8th Symphony. Here, he claims that Haas did indeed depart from standard musicological practices in so far as he blended two manuscripts and made alterations without any obvious methodology. Cooke concedes that Nowak "may have musicological rectitude on his side," but goes on to say that "this is a unique case", before finally admitting that he much prefers the Haas.........