Bruckner

[doversoul1]

I cannot speak for professional Music Sociologists, but I think that there are so many different listening talents amongst "general listeners" that it's impossible for me to make generalised comments about them. Us. Analysis is just careful, attentive listening and memory - the technical bits only come from knowing the "names". "Modulation", "flattened subdominant", "prolongation", "hexatonic cycle" etc etc etc - these are really just adjectives to describe what everyone who is paying attention hears in a performance, even if they do not know the technical terms to describe these features.

Similarly, Literary analysis is just careful, attentive reading; and visual Art analysis careful, attentive looking. It can be made easier (and "fuller", more empowered) through learning listening/reading/viewing tactics: and these give a common language to communicate ideas and informed opinions of Art - but individuals without such training can, if they are so inclined, develop their own ways of regarding and thinking about these matters - and perhaps even unconsciously.
Numquam Satis!

I think knowing names can make critical differences but I don’t think it will be particularly useful here to keep on about it. Many thanks for your thoughts and explanations. Good listening!

[Richard Tarleton]

I cannot speak for professional Music Sociologists, but I think that there are so many different listening talents amongst "general listeners" that it's impossible for me to make generalised comments about them. Us. Analysis is just careful, attentive listening and memory - the technical bits only come from knowing the "names". "Modulation", "flattened subdominant", "prolongation", "hexatonic cycle" etc etc etc - these are really just adjectives to describe what everyone who is paying attention hears in a performance, even if they do not know the technical terms to describe these features.

Similarly, Literary analysis is just careful, attentive reading; and visual Art analysis careful, attentive looking. It can be made easier (and "fuller", more empowered) through learning listening/reading/viewing tactics: and these give a common language to communicate ideas and informed opinions of Art - but individuals without such training can, if they are so inclined, develop their own ways of regarding and thinking about these matters - and perhaps even unconsciously.
Numquam Satis!

Spot on.

[Richard Barrett]

I posted this in the What Classical Music thread last night but maybe this would be a better place for it given that I was hoping for some responses!

I guess the recent recordings of Bruckner symphonies by Andris Nelsons and the Gewandhausorchester have been mentioned here before, but if so I've missed those mentions, and started with the 7th today as a result of a tipoff in another place. I ended up not being able to give it my full attention but first impressions are very positive indeed.

[crb11]

I posted this in the What Classical Music thread last night but maybe this would be a better place for it given that I was hoping for some responses!

I guess the recent recordings of Bruckner symphonies by Andris Nelsons and the Gewandhausorchester have been mentioned here before, but if so I've missed those mentions, and started with the 7th today as a result of a tipoff in another place. I ended up not being able to give it my full attention but first impressions are very positive indeed.

I have the CD of the 7th and also the 6/9 pair. I also very much like the 7th: Nelsons seems to bring out a very expressive sound from orchestras he conducts and he has a top one on hand here. The recording quality is also high. The interpretation is relatively "straight" and works well. I wasn't quite so convinced by the other two: while the 7th in some sense "plays itself", both of the others need a little more steer, and I didn't feel that Nelsons was doing quite enough, particularly in the 6th. It seems to be amenable to a number of different approaches, but just "play it like the other Bruckner symphonies" doesn't seem to be a particularly successful one, and Nelsons isn't the first to fall into this trap.

Worth commenting on the Wagner accompaniments as well which are in my view better than the Bruckner, and I'll be getting the discs out just for them on occasion.

[Jonathan]

Not sure if this has been mentioned but William Carrigan has very recently written a book about the 11 symphonies, it's available via the American Bruckner Society website.

[Richard Barrett]

I have the CD of the 7th and also the 6/9 pair. I also very much like the 7th: Nelsons seems to bring out a very expressive sound from orchestras he conducts and he has a top one on hand here. The recording quality is also high. The interpretation is relatively "straight" and works well. I wasn't quite so convinced by the other two: while the 7th in some sense "plays itself", both of the others need a little more steer, and I didn't feel that Nelsons was doing quite enough, particularly in the 6th. It seems to be amenable to a number of different approaches, but just "play it like the other Bruckner symphonies" doesn't seem to be a particularly successful one, and Nelsons isn't the first to fall into this trap.

Worth commenting on the Wagner accompaniments as well which are in my view better than the Bruckner, and I'll be getting the discs out just for them on occasion.

Thanks for those comments. The recording quality is certainly exceptional. I look forward to having the time and space to investigate these recordings further, but I did listen also to the first movement of no.6 which I found very much to my taste, emphasising consistency over contrast and with a great subtlety in tempo and dynamic. I really don't like performances of this movement where an overenthusiastic brass section tips the first subject into Western film theme territory... My benchmark for no.7 (and 8 and 9) is Giulini with the VPO, but since this combination didn't record no.6 I feel like I've been waiting for a recording like this one to come along. On the strength of the first movement anyway.

I'm looking forward also to taking in the Wagner pieces.

[Petrushka]

I have the CD of the 7th and also the 6/9 pair. I also very much like the 7th: Nelsons seems to bring out a very expressive sound from orchestras he conducts and he has a top one on hand here. The recording quality is also high. The interpretation is relatively "straight" and works well. I wasn't quite so convinced by the other two: while the 7th in some sense "plays itself", both of the others need a little more steer, and I didn't feel that Nelsons was doing quite enough, particularly in the 6th. It seems to be amenable to a number of different approaches, but just "play it like the other Bruckner symphonies" doesn't seem to be a particularly successful one, and Nelsons isn't the first to fall into this trap.

Worth commenting on the Wagner accompaniments as well which are in my view better than the Bruckner, and I'll be getting the discs out just for them on occasion.

I also have the CD of the Bruckner 7 and am in agreement with your comments. Nelsons' account of the 4th is also very good but the Gramophone review of the coupling of 6 & 9 sided with your own findings and put me off investigating on the grounds that I have very fine recordings already from Karajan, Haitink and Jochum amongst others.

[jayne lee wilson]

I tried the Nelsons 7th when it appeared but found it "all too beautiful', dwelling upon the moment, the sheer beauty of sound, without much sense of shape or direction. There's a softness to the orchestral contours which fell upon my ear rather monotonously. But any B7 that goes much beyond 60' tends to lose my attention nowadays. Nelsons seems too rhapsodically entranced, if not exactly loving the 7th to death then perhaps spoiling it with rather too many sugary treats.

RO gave this 7th short shrift in Gramophone, finding it often "drfitless" suffering from "doleful" tempi and the lack of any commanding pulse or line, "lavishing" most of its attention on that beautified sound. He found greater "sprightliness" in the last two movements at least, where Nelsons finally picks his feet up.

These days I want more earth, guts, more Schubertian dance and Austrian song in Bruckner...but above all a really sharp firm control over sound and line, within which a variable tempo can be very compelling indeed...

Conductors as different in their approach as Andreae, the earlier Haitink and my latter-day friend Venzago all pull it off, getting closer to the truth and the roots of it all....

Venzago stretches to 64' and creates an astonishingly translucent sound; but it is never beautified, is very daring in its rubato and tempo relations, and seems to me to relate closely to that Austrian pastoral essence. One of Nature's miracles.
Opposite pole but equally compelling, Otto Klemperer's thrillingly sure, rugged and direct live reading of 2/58 with the Vienna Symphony, issued on Testament.
I think Petrushka also admires that one?

[Richard Barrett]

These days I want more earth, guts, more Schubertian dance and Austrian song in Bruckner...but above all a really sharp firm control over sound and line, within which a variable tempo can be very compelling indeed...

Of course, any sufficiently profound and complex artistic statement (cf Shakespeare) is impossible to encapsulate in a single approach to interpretation, which is one reason why so many people are interested in hearing and getting to know different views of the same music. Pausing to remark that I don't give much of a damn what any critic might have said about Nelsons's recording of no.7, I think what is attractive to me about it is precisely the way in which it makes each sound and sound-complex a new facet of the luminous vision that seems inherent in the music, whatever other qualities might at other times and by other people be emphasised, and the way in which it takes the opportunities offered by the beautiful acoustic and ensemble to bring out such qualities to the maximum degree. That is Bruckner too, after all - and I make no excuses for wishing to get as close as a recording can to what a finely honed 21st century orchestral sound can be, with Bruckner's score as its vehicle, given that I haven't heard a real orchestra for so many months now. But of course one's musical preferences are never static, nor ought they to be.

[crb11]

I'd agree with Richard on this. To pick up on Jayne's analogy, sometimes if life gives you lemons, it's good to make a lemon torte with rather too much whipped cream!

I listened to the Klemperer recording mentioned this morning (perhaps for the first time) and it brings out elements of the music that Nelsons doesn't - probably a more coherent idea of the large-scale structures, but you don't get the same sense of the beauty of the harmony over shorter periods. (And not just because it's a live recording with some ensemble issues and recording quality of the time.) I want both, so I can experience the music both in the way Richard describes, and in the way Jayne does, and in various others I'm not sure I know how to put into words.

I probably ought to clarify what I said about the other two symphonies: it's not that they're bad in any way, but we've been blessed with a number of excellent recordings of both in recent years, and I think they just have the edge over Nelsons sufficiently. I still do listen to Nelsons' 9th from time to time.

[jayne lee wilson]

Has anyone else here heard the Venzago 7th with the Basle SO? Heard again at dawn...quite special. You have the clarity of line, the expressive tempo variabile freedom to follow the emotional mood and moment, a unique sonic translucency, and I feel there is quite enough "vision" in there(**), whatever that somewhat clichéd Brucknerian vocabulary-of-commentary may actually mean. I love the way the adagio climax rolls up into gentle waves, never too overwhelming.....Venzago is nothing if not anti-rhetorical, and truly understands those Pastoral sources and essences (birdcalls etc).

AS for the 6th, the two most recent - LSO/Rattle and Bergen SO/Dausgaard changed my whole view of the catalogue; Dausgaard especially, but perhaps because he is given the better sound over the LSO Live characteristics. But Rattle is very thought-provoking and insightful, nonetheless. Both creative directors know exactly where they want the music to go - so important in perhaps the most unusual and individual Brucknerian Symphony of all; the finale still appears to baffle many who encounter it, and no wonder.
I still hope for a complete Dausgaard 9th (i.e. 4 movements), along the interpretive lines of that BBCSSO one....

I would add that listening to the Bruckner Masses - No.2 especially of which there have been two very fine new recordings recently - is very enlightening in one's understanding of the symphonies, how they came to be what they are. Many pre- and post- echoes of the symphonic creations are referenced within...

(**) Taken to its creative extreme and beyond, in Celi's Munich extravagances...

[Bryn]

Has anyone else here heard the Venzago 7th wit he Basle SO? Heard again at dawn...quite special. You have the clarity of line, the expressive tempo variabile freedom to follow the emotional mood and moment, and I feel there is quite enough "vision" in there, whatever that somewhat clichéd Brucknerian vocabulary-of-commentary may actually mean. I love the way the adagio climax rolls up into gentle waves, never too overwhelming.....Venzago is nothing if not anti-rhetorical, and truly understands those Pastoral sources and essences (birdcalls etc).

AS for the 6th, the two most recent - LSO/Rattle and Bergen SO/Dausgaard changed my whole view of the catalogue; Dausgaard especially, but perhaps because he is given the better sound over the LSO Live characteristics. But Rattle is very thought-provoking and insightful, nonetheless. I still hope for a complete Dausgaard 9th (i.e. 4 movements), along the interpretive lines of that BBCSSO one....

"BBCSSO one "? I recall there being three, of which two (Glasgow and Edinburgh) were broadcast. I don't think the Perth performance made it to air. Very much agree that a commercial release with the Bergen SO would be very welcome.

[jayne lee wilson]

"BBCSSO one "? I recall there being three, of which two (Glasgow and Edinburgh) were broadcast. I don't think the Perth performance made it to air. Very much agree that a commercial release with the Bergen SO would be very welcome.

Yes, I know that, but I was referencing the general interpretive approach. 4 movements, swift and clear and to-the-point! Very refreshing!

[Bryn]

Yes, I know that, but I was referencing the general interpretive approach. 4 movements, swift and clear and to-the-point! Very refreshing!

Just a little ironic pedantry on my part. My main point was to concur with your advocacy for a commercial recording.

[Richard Barrett]

Has anyone else here heard the Venzago 7th with the Basle SO? Heard again at dawn...quite special. You have the clarity of line, the expressive tempo variabile freedom to follow the emotional mood and moment, a unique sonic translucency, and I feel there is quite enough "vision" in there(**)

Yes I've heard it, quite a few times, and I like it a lot. It certainly has qualities that the Nelsons recording doesn't, but what it doesn't have is the Gewandhausorchester which at the moment is my idea of an orchestral sound so beautiful it almost overrides all other considerations, and, as I said, this is one of the things Bruckner's symphonies can bring out.

A word about "vision". I agree that it's a lazily overused word where this music is concerned, and of course nobody can know in principle what it was that Bruckner "saw". But I reserve the right to make precisely calibrated use of words others might use lazily! The sense in which it came to me as the word to use here is the way that each moment takes on a "timeless" quality as if a complete new vista is unfolded, rather than each moment participating in the kind of "forward motion" that some might see as desirable in this music. Nelsons and his players have convinced me at this point, by whatever means, that I don't need that momentum, or for things to be "to the point".

PS I just got to the end of the 6th and along came the Parsifal prelude. Amazing!