BaL 31.12.16 - Bruckner: Symphony no. 3 in D minor

[P. G. Tipps]

What did the more knowledgeable Brucknerians here make of TS's concluding thesis that AB's (and later editors') continuing attempts to make this work, particularly the finale, coherent were doomed because the very essence of it is the incoherence/ incompatability of the thematic material? So better accept and embrace this than attempt a self-defeating synthesis.

[Probably I summarize too crudely... ]

Yes, that rather baffled me as well and I gave up trying to work it out ... Tom does love to shower us with some bewildering trade language from time to time, though.

Surely the unique thrill of Bruckner's music is the stark and almost anarchic juxtaposition of different themes and loud and quiet passages? Doesn't that reflect life itself or as Bruckner himself remarked its 'joy and sadness'?

I don't believe the composer had any particular trouble in 'making it work' he simply wanted to make it more acceptable to others or simply add what he considered to be 'improvements'

Being a musically-uneducated listener I readily admit I don't understand any of that academic gobbledegook. Bruckner's Third 'works' a treat for me in any version, but particularly the first. And it clearly worked for Tom himself even though he tells us it can't possibly (work).

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... the solo trumpet theme was barely audible.

Isn't it a wonderful feeling to start the New Year by discovering that you've been a knob! (If only for the way it puts you in kilter with everyone else.)

Just listened to the broadcast of the Blomstedt, and yes, the solo trumpet is "distant" - a part of the texture rather than "melody and accompaniment" - but this enables the return of this material (fourteen pages later later at fig B in the score) when the theme is played, still marked p, but by all three trumpets to gain in mystery and accumulate strength and power. It is wonderfully done, and reveals the conductor's remarkable attention both to local detail and to the contribution that these details make to the wider course of the whole work.

It was hearing the difference between the two presentations of the trumpet theme that made me get out my copy of the score and follow the performance through; and, of course, such large-scale developments cannot be demonstrated in a BaL with its individual snippets. I am totally converted and convinced by this quite magnificent performance - time and time again, Blomstedt reveals facets of the score that have laid neglected on the page by Tintner and Inbal, and his choice of Tempi and attention to instrumental balance and the architecture of both the individual movements and their relationship to each other is utterly masterly. The orchestra plays magnificently throughout - and this is a Live concert (?from a series of Live concerts?): an astonishing level of social and individual accuracy and Musicianship! Those heterophonic syncopated unisons in the Finale, which sound like the lower instruments were being played by a collection of Corporal Joneses at Tintner's slower tempo, really blaze in this performance.

It isn't "perfect" - some petty quibbles about this event, or that; and I do wish that the Viola section had had a couple of extra desks (or a microphone a couple of inches closer to them) - but the score is so rich and generous that it cannot have a "perfect" performance. But there's none better - and it makes it very, very clear that the 1873 first thoughts were the deepest Bruckner had for the work. (And the Wagner quotations don't really sound like Wagner quotations in this context - and the one before figure S - divided strings in chromatic contrary motion - sounds more like a premonition of the Third Movement of Bruckner's own Ninth Symphony.) But, by the same token, there isn't (and cannot be) a "better" performance/recording, regardless of personal preferences for this or that other recording.

So, whilst it is still true that

At current prices, I shan't be investing.

... as soon as this becomes readily available, it's going to be added to my collection - and I'm going to be listening again to this morning's broadcast many times over the next month. Tom Service did the goods.

Happy New Year, everyone!

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Tom Service did the goods.

A very happy and welcome situation - one that I didn't expect.

[Beef Oven!]

Great coda ferney (#242)

On reading your wonderful postscript-summary, I can’t resist it!

I shall be investing like you, when the prices go easy.

[BBMmk2]

Well, I wasn't so keen on the Blomstedt recording. I'll be sticking with the Haitink, Chailly, and Tennstedt.

Ferney #212: I just couldn't agree with TS on this occasion. I understood completely what he was saying but I'm afraid didn't gel with me.

[Beef Oven!]

I’ve just this minute downloaded the Profil Tennstedt, Sinfonieorchester Bayerischen Runfunk from Qobuz. I will listen to it in a minute.

For now, I think I’ll leave it at that with B3. In the future I’ll add the Blomstedt and probably the Gunter Wand NDR on Profil, when I can find it outside of a box-set/download set.

[PJPJ]

Well, I wasn't so keen on the Blomstedt recording. I'll be sticking with the Haitink, Chailly, and Tennstedt.

Ferney #212: I just couldn't agree with TS on this occasion. I understood completely what he was saying but I'm afraid didn't gel with me.

I enjoy the Haitink and Chailly recordings, too. How many recordings does one need? I have far too many, including Kna's 1954 one which I got to know via an LP with horrendous pre-echo so you heard it twice in one sitting. I still love it in its CD incarnation. Schaller is certainly worth hearing, I think. I'm certainly tempted to hear Tennstedt's Bavarian and Nezet's Dresden ones.

Forced to keep one cycle, I'd hang on to Blomstedt in Leipzig - fine performances in realistic concert-hall sound. I managed to acquire the set cheaply a while ago, from JPC IIRC. Querstand's website doesn't seem to work well, worryingly.....

http://querstand.de/

[BBMmk2]

Hi PJPJ :)

Perhaps I need to re-evaluate the Blomstedt?

[PJPJ]

Hi PJPJ :)

Perhaps I need to re-evaluate the Blomstedt?

I've just been listening to the Tennstedt samples on qobuz - tremendously exciting! I see Profil is on special offer @ MDT..........

[Bryn]

I enjoy the Haitink and Chailly recordings, too. How many recordings does one need? I have far too many, including Kna's 1954 one which I got to know via an LP with horrendous pre-echo so you heard it twice in one sitting. I still love it in its CD incarnation. Schaller is certainly worth hearing, I think. I'm certainly tempted to hear Tennstedt's Bavarian and Nezet's Dresden ones.

Forced to keep one cycle, I'd hang on to Blomstedt in Leipzig - fine performances in realistic concert-hall sound. I managed to acquire the set cheaply a while ago, from JPC IIRC. Querstand's website doesn't seem to work well, worryingly.....

http://querstand.de/

As I mentioned in #224, it's the English language site which is under construction. If you click on the "DE" to the top right of the page you linked to, it takes you to the German language site which works well.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Perhaps I need to re-evaluate the Blomstedt?

I recommend at least a listen to this morning's broadcast on the i-Player, Bbm; it turned this sceptic into a true believer - no easy task!

And best wishes for the New Year, by the way - with particular hopes that the first three months pass much more smoothly than you've been thinking they might

[Richard Tarleton]

Marvellous performance I thought, have put myself on the Amazon waiting list.

[PJPJ]

As I mentioned in #224, it's the English language site which is under construction. If you click on the "DE" to the top right of the page you linked to, it takes you to the German language site which works well.

Bryn, my apologies - I failed to read........ thank goodness all seems well.

[jayne lee wilson]

Well I did have a good New year’s Eve. The Reds gritted out a 1-0 against City to keep us on Chelsea’s coat-tails, and BaL’s Tom Service chose three of my favourite Bruckner 3rds (Blomstedt 2, Norrington 2, Young - vide #6 above) among his current top choices. That always feels good doesn’t it?

I’ve promoted the virtues of this and Blomstedt’s other later Querstand Bruckner, especially of the early symphonies, for several years here, thankfully with some positive responses. But how soon we forget... Should’ve bought them when they were a tenner, shouldn’t ya?
And I feel that “availability” is a stale red herring now as recordings often reappear 2ndhand, or as downloads, or can be discovered in less obvious webshops, as many a Gramophone reviewer recognises nowadays (not before time). No rules anymore. Just go look - go seek.

***

I found Tom’s summaries of earlier recordings such as Karajan (my first love, now sounding too gleamingly late-Brucknerian for this listener's comfort), the last NDR/Wand and the VPO/Haitink very fair and sharply illustrated, showing how slow(ish) and unvarying pace or stiff phrasing can drain so much life and charm away from the adagio or the gesansperioden, but also how Simone Young had taken the more flexible approach a little too far in the finale (although, in context I must say I do enjoy it, and her reading of 3/1873 really is one of the true Brucknerian essentials. Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes a similarly ingratiating line into the polka in his 2008 recently-released live Dresden State performance. Which has its merits - but the drawn out andante-adagio feel of the 26'+ first movement, its monumentalised, then accelerated climax; the almost static lyrical episodes within the climaxes and their moments of rhetorical overemphasis, are among the drawbacks. Still, it improves in the scherzo (despite a trio lacking schwung) and especially the finale, which latter YNS shapes as well as anyone, in Dresden or Montreal).

More than pleased too, to hear of Tom’s dislike for the vastly slow, monumental approach to Bruckner so appallingly exemplified by Ballot and, sadly, Tintner (in No.3 at least - he’s often a very fluent and expressive Brucknerian elsewhere) and which seems to leave out so many of the music’s widely varying moods, adventures and colours. I might, sometimes, reluctantly accept that some of the music, (or at least the orchestral style, only superficially Wagnerian) may seem to lend itself to such an approach, but on other days I could easily call it as self-aggrandisement on the part of too many conductors (and probably listeners too). It sounds to me now as a rather dated, Brucknerian performance style, where grandeur (or worse, grandiloquence) of sonic character obscures the merits or otherwise of the interpretation, imposing itself upon, rather than serving, the music.
Make a big noise, let the notes look after themselves…
(This can seem partly true even in less extreme recordings - it’s fruitful to compare Haitink’s sharply-focussed Amsterdam cycle from the 1960s (and the 1964 3rd especially) with his later VPO readings where despite evident gains in sheer sonic magnificence, the actual music, in its varied moods, structural shaping and its melodic detail, seems less vividly realised. Ah, the lure of the Official Great Orchestras...)

But this sound-over-sense Romantic rhetoric does command quite a following, which is perhaps why some listeners will find the quicker, leaner, freshened approach of such as Blomstedt (or Norrington, excellent with the SWR in 3/1873) a challenge to enjoy or come to terms with. I feel this latter is much closer to the musical essence - more Austrian, country-cousin provincial or “local”. Get that right first, then the potential for anything universal or “mystical” or visionary can look after itself, really. It doesn’t have to be there. Plenty of choices to indulge, if you can’t live without it.
(That quick-witted out-of-Schubert approach was always there of course, back through the early Haitink, to Volkmar Andreae and of course Knappertsbusch, with the sound of old Vienna is his blood and that of his players, despite editional choices, his various textual emendations or anomalies. His 1954 VPO 3/1890, bitingly articulated and effortlessly songful, is one of the most compelling of all - at least until that irredeemable Schalk-Bruckner abridgement supposedly constituting a “revised finale”. An essential part of any Brucknerian education.
But somewhere into the stereophonic era this tradition fell off the Brucknerian listening and performing radar, and ended up an inspiration to the “revisionism” of such as Norrington and Venzago).

***

Tom Service dealt with the Editions Question very well, I thought - concise and precise, even if I can’t agree with him about the irrelevance of texts or editions in the face of great recordings. Despite the large field, as one who has bought most 1873-edition recordings as they appeared (well, as long as they were the youthful side of 75 minutes) I think the the 2010 Blomstedt was an excellent choice. Good if you know “Bruckner Symphony No.3” in any later version, even better if you don’t.

There is, by the way, an earlier Blomstedt/Leipzig recording of 3/1873 from 1998 in this box, with a closely similar structural tautness and excitement. The sound is less refined than the 2010 cd/sacd, but more immediate and the performance if anything even more dramatically direct and physically exciting than Service’s recommendation.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Herbert-Blomstedt-1998-Gewandhausorchester-Leipzig/dp/B0009K2TT6/ref=sr_1_3?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1483219988&sr=1-3&keywords=blomstedt+querstand#reviewBucketHeader

[PJPJ]

................

(That quick-witted out-of-Schubert approach was always there of course, back through the early Haitink, to Volkmar Andreae and of course Knappertsbusch, with the sound of old Vienna is his blood and that of his players, despite editional choices, his various textual emendations or anomalies. His 1954 VPO 3/1890, bitingly articulated and effortlessly songful, is one of the most compelling of all - at least until that irredeemable Schalk-Bruckner abridgement supposedly constituting a “revised finale”. An essential part of any Brucknerian education.

I must say this afternoon's listening to Kna's Decca 1954 recording (in the Testament CD incarnation) gave much pleasure, so much that I readily forgive the edition used. Having listened after the Blomstedt as an SACD with surround sound, I was thoroughly impressed by the very fine mono Decca recording. And, as you say, the Vienna Philharmonic doesn't sound anything like that these days.