Prom 45: Thursday 18th August 2011 at 7.00 p.m.(Larcher, Bruckner)

[jayne lee wilson]

On the matter of the 8th, so much to say, I think we should all re-convene on August 30! By the way, makropulos, Tintner's recorded 8th is in fact the Nowak edn. of 1887; have to check, so far as I know he didn't record the 1890 one in any edition.

Totally agree about the 3rd, I'd go further and say that, scherzo apart, the 1889 version is a complete ruination, a spatchcocking of crudely stitched-together blocks of music, especially the finale, destroying the continuity of the original without creating any convincing alternative. The only version that really makes sense is the 1874 original, but one has to admit its teeming inventiveness and originality is compromised by a certain structural unwieldiness. Extraordinary creation though, out-of-its-time and still very challenging today (as we're proving here!). One suspects he only made the final revision to try to get it played, and because of the traumatic memory of the 1874 edition's premiere...

Absolutely - that's very much the point, and whatever our scruples or simple preferences about one version or another, there are multiple rather good performances of them from which to choose. I tend to side with Carragan et al in, as it were, the moral argument re Bruckner texts, but you and Tintner both make perfectly reasonable points. Mind you, his defence of Haas does sound a bit like special pleading so that Tintner can justify including all the bits he wanted to play, without having to use the 1887 score that has those bars anyway. Maybe 'recomposition' was a bit strong - but it is a bit of reverse engineering that I (honestly) don't think is an improvement. (That's a matter of taste, of course).

(As a late-night aside - though it's really not a pleasant one and I'm afraid it tends to colour my view of Haas - there's also the inescapably grim matter of the first publication of his edition of No. 8 and it's unfortunate dedication, as well as Haas's worryingly loyal - since 1933 - membership of the NSDAP. But then he's hardly the only musician...)

My own particular Brucknerian bugbear isn't one of the pieces (probably) interfered with by well-meaning friends, but Bruckner himself, when he made the final revision of No. 3 - I find it vastly less satisfying than the 1878 [or 1877] version - but others, I'm sure don't agree. The thing is, it doesn't matter because I can listen to Matacic, Kubelik and Haitink, while anyone wanting 1889 can enjoy Boehm, Jochum et al. Credit to Nowak for making both of them (and, indeed the 1873 version) so readily available - so the choice is there for conductors in the first place. We're really spoilt rotten.

[bluestateprommer]

I perhaps had a slight advantage in hitting up the iPlayer to listen to this Prom, since I generally don't expect modern works to have 19th century, or even early 20th century, tunes :) . In that sense, the Larcher work wasn't different from other modern works I've heard from the Proms or elsewhere. However, what made this one different was the incorporation, or perhaps pasting on, of the "gypsy" / improvisatory element in Larcher's concerto, where in concerts of jazz or "world music", there is more of an element of the music being more about the performers' virtuosity rather than about the 'tunes' per se. In other words, after hearing a really hot solo from a jazz saxophonist or pianist, or a gypsy fiddler or cimbalon player, you remember the instrumentalist's virtuosity, but not necessarily the exact notes they played. I'm saying this very awkwardly, but I hope that this makes sense. One or two of the tutti passages almost had a classical-pastiche sense, perhaps in some hommage to Larcher's Austrian background, as Matthew Barley alluded to in the pre-music chit-chat.

I have to confess that I tend to fall into the "blind spot" category regarding Bruckner and his symphonies. I've tried listening to them over the years, and have heard 7 of them live, and they just don't do it for me. But #5 is one of the two (or three, counting "No. 0") that I've never heard live, and while iPlayer isn't the same as live and in person, I gave the BBC SSO/Volkov #5 a listen. The sense that I got was that Volkov was trying to avoid a "churchy" pace in not being overly slow or ponderous. Some of the ends of paragraphs seemed even a tad perfunctory. However, some small kudos to The Proms for being willing to take a bath at the box office on Bruckner, where it'll be interesting to see how well the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic does with Bruckner 8 soon.