BaL 20.02.21 - Bruckner: Symphony no. 6

[Bryn]

. . . one conductor who tried to do just that, and whose attempts were very luke warmly received at the time, was Dohnanyi in Cleveland (6th nla I believe), but the 9th at least was a resounding success.

A few used copies are to be found via amazon.co.uk etc.

[Petrushka]

The scherzo of the 6th is, I think, my favourite Bruckner scherzo. Just listen to what's going on in the background, all that scurrying and darting on strings and woodwind and a little trumpet figure that peeps through the texture at one point to humorous effect. It all seems like a woodland scene, a feeling confirmed by those magical horns in the trio. There's a master orchestrator at work here, no question.

[jayne lee wilson]

The scherzo of the 6th is, I think, my favourite Bruckner scherzo. Just listen to what's going on in the background, all that scurrying and darting on strings and woodwind and a little trumpet figure that peeps through the texture at one point to humorous effect. It all seems like a woodland scene, a feeling confirmed by those magical horns in the trio. There's a master orchestrator at work here, no question.

Yes, and with unusually explicit symphonic self-quotation (in the trio) of a kind that doesn't really occur again until the end of the 9th's adagio...

[richardfinegold]

I think Karajan could actually better away from the BPO. I don't know, this is difficult, but his last, live recordings with the VPO seem to me to have a greater humanity, less self perhaps than the Berlin recordings. Having said that his first BPO 8th for EMI from 1958 is arguably his finest.

The DG Jochum set was the one I grew up with, and he pulls the tempo around as much as anyone, but after a time listening to them began to make me feel uneasy, such that I never replaced it on CD. That's despite it having what I remember as being quite a visionary 9th. Amongst older recordings I remember with affection van Beinum's 7th on Decca; and wore out the copy in my local library.

Somebody mentioned earlier, if I remember correctly, performances that try to remove the accumulations of time and bring up Bruckner's scores afresh. Well one conductor who tried to do just that, and whose attempts were very luke warmly received at the time, was Dohnanyi in Cleveland (6th nla I believe), but the 9th at least was a resounding success.

The Jochum/Dresden set was my first Bruckner set. In the lp era (I guess that would be the First lp era) I owned Walter in 4 and I forget who in 9. Then my lps were destroyed in the mid eighties and I never did explore Bruckner on CD until I was in my late thirties with the aforementioned Jochum set. Jochum then, and now, makes me vertiginous. Jane may welcome some "gear shifting" to overcome some repetition and monotony, and I get that, but a lot of E.J. rubato seems arbitrary. Bruckner has enough trouble making a coherent symphonic argument (instead of developing themes, and making them appear to evolve, he seems to repeat them frequently and then suddenly shift a key or 3. This can be highly dramatic, and Sibelius must of thought it was the bees knees, but Sibelius was a lot more concise), and being distracted by the sudden speed ups or down or swells and diminuendos that Jochum seems to find in the music where others do not, really put me off Bruckner for years. Wand proved to be the tonic, and it was only a few years ago that I discovered Karajan, who I really think had an affinity for his fellow Austrian that I don't always detect when Karajan plays some other composers such as Tchaikovsky.
Wolfram and I seem to be on the same page, as I was listening to the late VPO Karajan Eighth , my favorite recording of that piece, Doom Music and all. I don't know if i will concede that these late VPO recordings topped his work in Berlin. As reproduced on Blu Ray, the sounds of Berliners are absolutely other worldly. I will be comparing the two Eights over the weekend

[jayne lee wilson]

The Jochum/Dresden set was my first Bruckner set. In the lp era (I guess that would be the First lp era) I owned Walter in 4 and I forget who in 9. Then my lps were destroyed in the mid eighties and I never did explore Bruckner on CD until I was in my late thirties with the aforementioned Jochum set. Jochum then, and now, makes me vertiginous. Jane may welcome some "gear shifting" to overcome some repetition and monotony, and I get that, but a lot of E.J. rubato seems arbitrary. Bruckner has enough trouble making a coherent symphonic argument (instead of developing themes, and making them appear to evolve, he seems to repeat them frequently and then suddenly shift a key or 3. This can be highly dramatic, and Sibelius must of thought it was the bees knees, but Sibelius was a lot more concise), and being distracted by the sudden speed ups or down or swells and diminuendos that Jochum seems to find in the music where others do not, really put me off Bruckner for years. Wand proved to be the tonic, and it was only a few years ago that I discovered Karajan, who I really think had an affinity for his fellow Austrian that I don't always detect when Karajan plays some other composers such as Tchaikovsky.
Wolfram and I seem to be on the same page, as I was listening to the late VPO Karajan Eighth , my favorite recording of that piece, Doom Music and all. I don't know if i will concede that these late VPO recordings topped his work in Berlin. As reproduced on Blu Ray, the sounds of Berliners are absolutely other worldly. I will be comparing the two Eights over the weekend

As I've often said (!) Jochum, despite his evident devotion, is one of my least favourite Bruckner Symphony interpreters precisely because his tempo changes are often so (though not invariably) stiff and awkward - "stop-go" as more than one Gramophonian used to refer to it. So "gear-shifting" is more of a pejorative term to me, whereas Bruckner is best served by a fluidity of pace and rubato which should at least feel natural, or to evolve organically from a given approach. This can be daringly wide-ranging or quite subtle, as I keep implying above....but it should seem to follow the changing moods of the piece.

***
In any case, it is absolutely NOT about "overcoming repetition or monotony" clichéd and stereotyped characteristics I find nowhere in Bruckner, whose ideas undergo continuous developmental, highly integrated evolution. It is simply about fully expressing the musical and emotional content. As for Bruckner having "trouble making a coherent symphonic argument" I'm just speechless. His style is one of the most original daring and yes, coherent symphonic creations in history. Easily exemplified fact, not opinion.

But we're back where we were a few weeks ago, when you said the ending of the 8th's first movement was without relation to the rest of the movement.
You said: "with the Doom Music of 8/I, it comes flying out of nowhere--it isn't the logical culmination of what has come before--old Anton simply pastes it on.".
Which is simply and demonstrably wrong in point of fact.
My reply was:
"At what point does your "doom music" begin? At the height of the developmental crisis (drawn from two of the main initial ideas) or where the stark, baleful brass fanfares enunciate the basic rhythm of the very first theme without any harmonic support?. Or the hushed final passage of the coda (the "death-watch", based on the last three notes of the first theme (heard at the outset)?"

All of the events in the development, recap and coda of 8(i) come from ideas stated in the symphony's first few minutes. So dramatically changed, that it seems you cannot recognise them, accusing poor Bruckner of incoherence and over-repetition instead. I keep having to defend Bruckner, and I feel dismayed. But you're a friend, and I'll keep trying to get it across.

(I should add that Jochum is much better in Bruckner's Masses, his DG recordings of which are true classics...and some of his live work in Amsterdam really raises the roof, suspending, at least temporarily, whatever interpretive misgivings one may have...to wit, the stunning 4th and 5th from that source..)

[Goon525]

I’m obviously a very shallow person, for which reason I won’t be taking up JLW’s various recommendations of performances from the ‘50s. Reason? For me, the sound really matters in Bruckner, more than with most other composers. So I enjoyed the Rattle 6th, and my assessment of its sound was closer to Jayne’s than RO’s. But my next Bruckner listen is likely to be the new Leipzig Nelsons 2 and 8 (which sounds worryingly like Cockney rhyming slang), even though the (4 star) first review I’ve seen in The Times reckons it’s a bit too beautiful. Probably a fault in the right direction for shallow old me!

[jayne lee wilson]

I’m obviously a very shallow person, for which reason I won’t be taking up JLW’s various recommendations of performances from the ‘50s. Reason? For me, the sound really matters in Bruckner, more than with most other composers. So I enjoyed the Rattle 6th, and my assessment of its sound was closer to Jayne’s than RO’s. But my next Bruckner listen is likely to be the new Leipzig Nelsons 2 and 8 (which sounds worryingly like Cockney rhyming slang), even though the (4 star) first review I’ve seen in The Times reckons it’s a bit too beautiful. Probably a fault in the right direction for shallow old me!

Maybe seek out the Andreae on Qobuz? Try the opening of the adagio, you might be surprised by how full, warm and echt-Viennese the strings sound, then the so-plaintive oboe comes in, as only a 1950s Vienna oboe could...
It is a marvellous restoration (Aaron Z Snyder, who also worked miracles with the 1939 Toscanini NNC Beethoven, M&A in 2013), using every digital trick in the book to stay free of sonic distractions. As for the performance....

Just listen to how the horns blend with the strings....playing now, quite impossible to turn off once begun.....even if you choose not to go beyond the adagio, I don't think you'll forget it....
Here's the coda now.... the wonderful descent in the strings, then that oboe again... how delicately Andreae draws this out of those vanished Viennese sonorities...... unique and unforgettable. I think I need to take a moment....

[richardfinegold]

As I've often said (!) Jochum, despite his evident devotion, is one of my least favourite Bruckner Symphony interpreters precisely because his tempo changes are often so (though not invariably) stiff and awkward - "stop-go" as more than one Gramophonian used to refer to it. So "gear-shifting" is more of a pejorative term to me, whereas Bruckner is best served by a fluidity of pace and rubato which should at least feel natural, or to evolve organically from a given approach. This can be daringly wide-ranging or quite subtle, as I keep implying above....but it should seem to follow the changing moods of the piece.

***
In any case, it is absolutely NOT about "overcoming repetition or monotony" clichéd and stereotyped characteristics I find nowhere in Bruckner, whose ideas undergo continuous developmental, highly integrated evolution. It is simply about fully expressing the musical and emotional content. As for Bruckner having "trouble making a coherent symphonic argument" I'm just speechless. His style is one of the most original daring and yes, coherent symphonic creations in history. Easily exemplified fact, not opinion.

But we're back where we were a few weeks ago, when you said the ending of the 8th's first movement was without relation to the rest of the movement.
You said: "with the Doom Music of 8/I, it comes flying out of nowhere--it isn't the logical culmination of what has come before--old Anton simply pastes it on.".
Which is simply and demonstrably wrong in point of fact.
My reply was:
"At what point does your "doom music" begin? At the height of the developmental crisis (drawn from two of the main initial ideas) or where the stark, baleful brass fanfares enunciate the basic rhythm of the very first theme without any harmonic support?. Or the hushed final passage of the coda (the "death-watch", based on the last three notes of the first theme (heard at the outset)?"

All of the events in the development, recap and coda of 8(i) come from ideas stated in the symphony's first few minutes. So dramatically changed, that it seems you cannot recognise them, accusing poor Bruckner of incoherence and over-repetition instead. I keep having to defend Bruckner, and I feel dismayed. But you're a friend, and I'll keep trying to get it across.

(I should add that Jochum is much better in Bruckner's Masses, his DG recordings of which are true classics...and some of his live work in Amsterdam really raises the roof, suspending, at least temporarily, whatever interpretive misgivings one may have...to wit, the stunning 4th and 5th from that source..)

I think we are agreeing on Jochum, so let it rest there.
As to whether Bruckner was a coherent symphonies, I cannot accept your arguments, so I let them slide. I find myself agreeing with Brahms analysis of Bruckner, as quoted in Jan Swafford Brahms biography. Regrettably I don’t have it on hand to quote or the time to seek it out. I can only repeat myself, and sound Brucknerian in redundancy by doing so, but there are just to many places where AB repeats the same phrases, albeit with different combinations of instruments, and then suddenly the music bursts forth gloriously in a different key. It’s a heck of a trick, but it isn’t organic, or whatever the term is. It isn’t like having themes that are developed, set in opposition, develop and recapitulate. It isn’t like watching a plant grow from a seed by time lapse photography into a complex structure with roots, a trunk, many branches and flowers. Instead we watch the seed get planted, a few stuttering roots, and BIFF! SHAZAM! Smoke appears, when it clears, the plant is there in all it’s glory! How, you query? Don’t worry about that man behind the curtain! Personally, I like to see the roots form the rest of the structure, but , but that doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the final outcome. For all my criticisms, I really enjoy Bruckner .
Didn’t Tovey say that Bruckner had his moments, but oh, those half hours in between? Until I heard Wand I agreed with that. He needs a sympathetic Conductor who knows the rhetoric, who can make the repetition seem as thought it has a point, and imo, can sculpt sheer beauty of sound. There is something transcendent, other worldly about Bruckner. The Mystery of Religion is how otherwise thoughtful people surrender themselves to the various Creation stories, willingly suspend the World of Logic because that world doesn’t fill a spiritual need. Bruckner, a devout Catholic, understood this. Perhaps rigorous adherence to the constraints of Sonata form didn’t work for him, didn’t get him to that place he needed to go. As Believers need to suspend Doubt and simply believe, Bruckner needs to reveal wonders unimaginable, and maybe he isn’t formally perfect. I’m damn happy to accept what he did achieve. Complaining that AB wasn’t a perfect Symphonist is like complaining that El Greco couldn’t correctly paint a face

[jayne lee wilson]

I am not really advancing arguments, merely describing what is there in Bruckner's music. I have pointed out as clearly as I can how the climactic moments of the Bruckner 8(i) are arrived at....but you still don't respond. Can you hear the thematic derivations now?

On the subject of sonata-allegro, symphonic development and Brahms...

Most of Bruckner's first and last symphonic movements are based upon three-subject sonata forms, with very eventful developments and continuously evolving recapitulatory sections (where the material always appears in different shapes and new harmonic contexts) usually with a very extensive and exciting coda.
Very easy to describe or demonstrate, as various writers have commented before me. That is their classical formal background. I, Simpson, or Korstvedt are not imagining them, you are simply missing them. What he does against that background is, like all great art, profoundly original. But very sadly it seems I would be wasting my time describing further examples.

Not that Brahms ever followed any kind of conventional sonata-form himself in his symphonic works; like Bruckner, his mastery was so advanced he created new structures against such classical backgrounds in every piece. What form would you say the finale of the Brahms 1st is in? Any ideas? Like the astoundingly compressed, dazzlingly original Bruckner 7 finale, it creates its own harmonic and structural logic against those classical backgrounds. And travels far from them. Try following it....is there a repeat, d'you think? What happens at the nominal leadback/recap or in the coda?

Finally back to the Bruckner 6th. Can you describe what actually happens, in respect of the musical material and how it is treated, in the coda to the first movement? It is very characteristic of the transformations he often effects, apart from being of course, one of the most thrilling passages in all of his works...
(While we're about it - which other Bruckner Symphony is very explicitly quoted in the trio of the 6th?).

[Richard Barrett]

I find it really fascinating how Bruckner's music gives rise to such polarised opinions. It's always been like that I guess. I think the idea that there's something wrong with Bruckner that needs some kind of especially sympathetic interpretation to put it right, though, should be discarded in favour of the idea that Bruckner knew exactly what he was doing, and exactly how to do it, and did it very well, as Dr Johnson said about his own dictionary, and if you don't like it that isn't Bruckner's responsibility or that of his interpreters. I was thinking only the other day that the first movement of no.8 is actually one of the most structurally integrated statements in orchestral music that I know - there isn't a singly wasted sound or moment and its vastness is in the sound-forms themselves; I could go on but that isn't the topic of this thread!

As for Goon525's comment, I completely agree that the sound really matters. It's a central part of what the music means to me: Bruckner didn't write his music to be reproduced through loudspeakers at all, let alone to be compressed in dynamic and frequency and shoehorned into a single loudspeaker. Whether this opinion is shallow I don't much care.

I don't much care for Brahms or his opinions either!

[Ein Heldenleben]

I can’t help thinking that if a work of art is to be really successful it needs to appreciable on first hearing without needing a good deal of complex musicological analysis. I think Bruckner 6 passes that test but then as a veteran of many long nights of Wagner I have no problem with (apparent ) repetition. I’ve given up trying to convince friends of the merits of either and trying to explain the transmutations , motivic developments etc . The only thing I do miss sometimes in both is the humour / wit that Haydn and Mozart got into their symphonic work.
On a side note the opening motto theme with its flattened notes and almost Eastern feel always sounds to me like nothing else in music up to that point . Such a great moment when it reappears partly inverted and is then tossed around through the sections ..

[silvestrione]

I think we are agreeing on Jochum, so let it rest there.
As to whether Bruckner was a coherent symphonies, I cannot accept your arguments, so I let them slide. I find myself agreeing with Brahms analysis of Bruckner, as quoted in Jan Swafford Brahms biography. Regrettably I don’t have it on hand to quote or the time to seek it out. I can only repeat myself, and sound Brucknerian in redundancy by doing so, but there are just to many places where AB repeats the same phrases, albeit with different combinations of instruments, and then suddenly the music bursts forth gloriously in a different key. It’s a heck of a trick, but it isn’t organic, or whatever the term is. It isn’t like having themes that are developed, set in opposition, develop and recapitulate. It isn’t like watching a plant grow from a seed by time lapse photography into a complex structure with roots, a trunk, many branches and flowers. Instead we watch the seed get planted, a few stuttering roots, and BIFF! SHAZAM! Smoke appears, when it clears, the plant is there in all it’s glory! How, you query? Don’t worry about that man behind the curtain! Personally, I like to see the roots form the rest of the structure, but , but that doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate the final outcome. For all my criticisms, I really enjoy Bruckner .
Didn’t Tovey say that Bruckner had his moments, but oh, those half hours in between? Until I heard Wand I agreed with that. He needs a sympathetic Conductor who knows the rhetoric, who can make the repetition seem as thought it has a point, and imo, can sculpt sheer beauty of sound. There is something transcendent, other worldly about Bruckner. The Mystery of Religion is how otherwise thoughtful people surrender themselves to the various Creation stories, willingly suspend the World of Logic because that world doesn’t fill a spiritual need. Bruckner, a devout Catholic, understood this. Perhaps rigorous adherence to the constraints of Sonata form didn’t work for him, didn’t get him to that place he needed to go. As Believers need to suspend Doubt and simply believe, Bruckner needs to reveal wonders unimaginable, and maybe he isn’t formally perfect. I’m damn happy to accept what he did achieve. Complaining that AB wasn’t a perfect Symphonist is like complaining that El Greco couldn’t correctly paint a face

I haven't come across that, but Tovey's excellent, helpful analysis of Bruckner 6 in Essays in Musical Analysis II is wholly positive and even seeks to rebut some (then) common criticisms of the composer.

[Richard Barrett]

I can’t help thinking that if a work of art is to be really successful it needs to appreciable on first hearing without needing a good deal of complex musicological analysis.

I don't know anyone who would disagree with that, but of course one person's "appreciable at first hearing" is another person's "impenetrably difficult" or "tedious and trivial" or any number of other possibilities. Nor is "complex musicological analysis" necessarily intended to persuade the unconvinced that something they find repellent or uninteresting is actually compelling and fascinating. What in fact is it for? Keeping up the publication scores of academics, mostly...

[mikealdren]

Not sure about "appreciable at first hearing", I can think of quite a number of works that made no impression on first hearing but that I have later grown to love. Perhaps I'm a slow learner?

[Ein Heldenleben]

I don't know anyone who would disagree with that, but of course one person's "appreciable at first hearing" is another person's "impenetrably difficult" or "tedious and trivial" or any number of other possibilities. Nor is "complex musicological analysis" necessarily intended to persuade the unconvinced that something they find repellent or uninteresting is actually compelling and fascinating. What in fact is it for? Keeping up the publication scores of academics, mostly...

Yes the phrase appreciable at first hearing is a bit question- begging . What do we mean by appreciable ? Do you need to subject any work of art to analysis to appreciate it ?Understand it? I used to read a lot of ‘complex musicological analysis ‘ , ploughed though Schenkerian analysis and in the end thought what is it all for? It’s the same with metrical analysis of poetry. Murray Perahia once said he’d spent months studying Schenker and it had helped with his interpretative skills. I honestly couldn’t hear any difference - just about everything he does sounds marvellous.