Bruckner 9; the four movement version

[Petrushka]

I have the Rattle recording and it is indeed a tremendous account but for all the scholarly discussion I find the music of the finale to be well below the quality of the three others. After listening to the recent wonderful performances from Abbado and Haitink (three movements, of course) I've resolved never to listen to the finale again except as a stand alone piece.

To this pair of ears, the finale sounds much more like early Bruckner and not worthy of what has gone before.

[Petrushka]

This thread reminds me that, many moons ago when my hair and teeth were intact, I played 8th horn/2nd F Wagner tuba with what was then called the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra in a recording of a Bruckner 9 finale reconstruction by Hans-Hubert Schuentzler (sorry if this is not the correct spelling) who I believe was actually Australian. This was then tacked on to a recording (made a couple of years previously) of the three-movement version of the 9th, with the same conductor, for broadcast. I was actually playing in that recording too but on 4th horn (as I recall, the horn sections for the two recordings were very different in personnel - three of the players on the earlier recording are now deceased).

Does anybody know more about this version - or about the conductor for that matter?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hubert_Sch%C3%B6nzeler

[Roehre]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hu...ch%C3%B6nzeler

Never trust Wikipedia. The "world-première" of Bruckner 3 in its 1873 version was not in Adelaide/Australia but in Linz/Austria, 8 (IIRC) September 1978, during the International Bruckner Fest. I was there. I still have got a tape of that performance, broadcast live all over Europe (well, at least in Austria, Germany [East & West !], Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium and Czechoslovakia).
Remarkable that the Adelaide Wikipedia Article doesn't mention this Bruckner performance at all

If one wants to have a well written and accurate Bruckner biography, HHSchönzeler's is a serious candidate, either in German or in English.

[Roehre]

This thread reminds me that, many moons ago when my hair and teeth were intact, I played 8th horn/2nd F Wagner tuba with what was then called the BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra in a recording of a Bruckner 9 finale reconstruction by Hans-Hubert Schuentzler (sorry if this is not the correct spelling) who I believe was actually Australian. This was then tacked on to a recording (made a couple of years previously) of the three-movement version of the 9th, with the same conductor, for broadcast. I was actually playing in that recording too but on 4th horn (as I recall, the horn sections for the two recordings were very different in personnel - three of the players on the earlier recording are now deceased).

Does anybody know more about this version - or about the conductor for that matter?

HS, was this in 1987 or '88 by any chance?

[Roehre]

..... I think it would take a real composer, with sufficient insight into Bruckner's music of course, to make it really convincing as music. Scholars tend to be too cautious and conservative. A case in point: Newbould's completion of Schubert's 10th symphony is all very well, but what Berio made of the same material in his Rendering (leaving aside for the sake of argument Berio's own interpolations) sounds not only more convincing but IMO more like Schubert, despite or because of the fact that Berio invented a considerable amount of accompanimental material which isn't in Schubert's sketch.

RB, I actually do think you've got a point.
Such an arrangement exists. In 1971 Gottfried von Einem presented his Bruckner Dialog. This was not based on the complete material as it is now known to Carraghan and Samale/cs, but only on the draft score and the sketches as published by Alfred Orel. Hence no hint of three of the four themes for the final quadruple fugue.
Though not interpolating widely à la Berio, it gives another view of the Finale, as independent orchestral work, as well as seen through the eyes of a "real" composer.
For me it's a Bruckner 9 Rendering

[Richard Tarleton]

I think Salymap mentioned dealings with Schonzeler at Augener. I'll pm doversoul as saly may like to remind us!

I was given Schonzeler's book on Bruckner for my birthday in 1971.

I've become a bit confused by this thread - is there a recommendable, commercially available recording of the 4th movement which gives an approximation of Bruckner's intentions?

[Roehre]

I think Salymap mentioned dealings with Schonzeler at Augener. I'll pm doversoul as saly may like to remind us!

I was given Schonzeler's book on Bruckner for my birthday in 1971.

I've become a bit confused by this thread - is there a recommendable, commercially available recording of the 4th movement which gives an approximation of Bruckner's intentions?

More than one, starting with Rattle/BPO and Wildner/Naxos e.g., but more here

[Richard Tarleton]

Many thanks Roehre!

[Pabmusic]

Isn't the first recording Kurt Eichhorn's?

Berky

Yes - well only sort of - no, no really. This completion of the finale has had a few incarnations - this is of the 'first ideas' by Nicola Samale and Giuseppe Mazzuca. The present version (dated 2012) and the previous one (2003) include the work of Benjamin Gunnar-Cohrs, who has conducted it many times and who edits the Bruckner critical edition. Both these versions are more alike than either is like the original.

The score preface that I posted includes the tortuous and tortured history as well as details of recordings going back to 1985.

[Barbirollians]

I like the fourth movement in the Rattle recording but there is no doubt that it is an approximation of what it would have sounded like had Bruckner completed it. I am wary of judging it really at all at present as unlike anton g above I am so used to the three movement torso . On the other hand , I cannot join with those who seem to suggest that all performances of Bruckner 9 should always conclude with this completion.

[jayne lee wilson]

Horribly out of place as I am in this wonderful scholarly discussion .....I have to say I find the Rattle recording a joy and return to it regularly. Maybe this is because before this I didn't really know B9 having, stupidly I suppose, ignored it as unfinished. To me the final movement "works" very well and this grey afternoon, breaking most of the rules in the FOR3 rule book, I listened to it as a bleeding chunk on headphones as I pushed my granddaughter through the muddy puddles. IMHO quite wonderful - thanks to all, especially , Roehre for the magical posts.

You're very lucky in first getting to know the 9th with the finale, and we could do with hearing more from those who do - which won't be so easy if conductors continue to play and record it sans finale. (Only Venzago could persuade me to buy another without it).

With Bruckner's finales generally - if a listener finds them "rambling" or "aimless", is it because they expect them to conform more neatly to a conceptual notion of classical form? Which they're never going to.
Robert Simpson, discussing the 7th, describes "...the attempts of two competitors to oust the rightful tonic. The form that grows from this is the result of three tonal forces acting from different directions, one of them strong enough to dominate the outcome, but not strong enough to maintain a simple course by sweeping the others out of the way. The piece evolves, and along no familiar lines..."

This finale has 3 thematic groups, the first and third closely related, and it's really not difficult to recognise them as they constantly evolve and develop through the attempts of those tonal forces to establish themselves against each other. There isn't the sense of travelling away-from and back-to the tonic as in a sonata, the process is much more fluid and organic as thematic shapes and harmonic contexts vary and change. But the conflicts clear away like storm clouds across a blue sky (always a tonic to see that...) - and the coda then appears calmly inevitable, not as the usual release of tension.
Not all the finales are the same either - 2 and 6 have more than a hint of sonata about them, but again there's much thematic relation and variation, the form is very fluid and it tends to be those tonal dramas that matter most.
So with Bruckner's finales you just have to go with the flow - follow the shapes that you hear - the music, in short; and as you become familiar with them (preferably VERY familiar) you may learn to love them for the far-flung, astoundingly original, often forward-looking creations that they are.

[Barbirollians]

You're very lucky in first getting to know the 9th with the finale, and we could do with hearing more from those who do - which won't be so easy if conductors continue to play and record it sans finale. (Only Venzago could persuade me to buy another without it).

So not tempted by the marvellous new Haitink then ?

[jayne lee wilson]

So not tempted by the marvellous new Haitink then ?

"New Haitink" sounds a bit oxymoronic to me... and anyway, "Old men ought to be explorers"... come on Uncle Bernard, you can do it!

[Boilk]

For me, and many others, the last movements of (most) of his symphonies tend to ramble aimlessly in a manner that does not seem to happen in the preceding movements.

I think symphonists have generally displayed a more relaxed approach to architecture in finales ... it's the earlier movements (opening sonata form and the A-B-A of the minuet/scherzo) where certain formal blueprints seem de rigeur. As much as I like them, I find the somewhat meandering finales of (say) Mahler 5 and 7 no less 'rambling' than Bruckner's.

[Richard Tarleton]

"New Haitink" sounds a bit oxymoronic to me... and anyway, "Old men ought to be explorers"... come on Uncle Bernard, you can do it!

Like Anton I'm no scholar - but unlike Anton have known the 9th in its 3 movement form for around 45 years, have been to performances inc Haitink/RCO, have several recordings from the quick (Walter) to the very slow (Giulini), with old, middling (1981) and "new" Haitinks, plus Wand and Colin Davis (the last neither here nor there, and on its way to Oxfam) - but thanks to this thread I've been listening - so far just to the 4th movement - to the Rattle, and it's a revelation. After the stasis at the end of the 3rd movement, the early bars of the 4th movement seems to me like waking in disoriented terror , with uneasy jostling of moods (vaguely reminiscent of Act 2 scene 3 of Die Walkure), some familiar-sounding Brucknerian sounds and a staggering coda. It'll be a while before it sinks into my unconscious the way the others do but I'm glad I've discovered it.