Prom 63 - 29.08.13: Mozart, Peter Eötvös & Bruckner

[edashtav]

E-P's spoken thoughts on the symphony, not as a great architectural structure, but rather like a toddler with a bag of toys, one toy [musical idea] played with for a while then rejected for the next, till the whole floor is scattered with them - was interesting (?) - at least it demonstrated his approach

it sounded glorious to my untutored ear (particularly the brass)

Did he really say that? My word, how open and honest. Trouble is the work is a symphonic argument whereas a bag of toys, or sweets, is just that: a suite. As a suite, full of Beechamesque lollipops, E-P's version was a considerable, brilliant, yes glorious success - I'd forgotten how well the Philharmonia can play and sound - but it failed,miserably, as a symphonic structure.

One problem with lollipops is that appetite becomes satiated. Is that why folk left the RAH mid-performance? With a symphony, or a good novel, one is gripped, carried forward, and one thirsts to know the outcome. Last night I was tickled, I gurgled repeatedly, like a baby afforded instant satisfaction; my intellect wasn't stirred.

[mercia]

Did he really say that?

well I think that was the gist of a snatch of interview we heard just before the symphony

[Flay]

well I think that was the gist of a snatch of interview we heard just before the symphony

Yes, but did he not say that his job was to pick up the pieces and sort them out?

[Alison]

I must say Esa Pekka's own far from negligible works very much mirror the suggested compositional method.

[Roehre]

I must say Esa Pekka's own far from negligible works very much mirror the suggested compositional method.

I like the Eötvös concerto - not E's most expansive or original score, but nevertheless an IMO interesting contribution to the violon-concerto-canon. Repeated listening will unveil quite a range of -some tongue in cheek- quotes too I think.

[Nick Armstrong]

The trouble is he played it like that! I am with Edashtav and Petrushka on this one. And, yes, a glorious sound, undoubtedly, but I would quite like quite a lot more! As Jayne said it was a fine broadcast but I turned the tape off (not the radio) when my irritation with Salonen's way with the work overcame my enjoyment of the sound that the Philharmonia were making.

Mr Kettle (who he? Ed.) would beg to disagree, it seems... http://www.theguardian.com/music/201...rmonia-salonen

[edashtav]

Traffic Lights Are Fine on Roads but Abhorrent in Bruckner

Oh, yes, there was so much to enjoy, but much of that - brilliant, polished playing, for example, could be retained in an interpretation that kept closer to Bruckner's score and that accepted the need for symphonic coherence.
I'll take one phrase out of context from the review: Bruckner should never be denied space

I'll draw back this far and say: this was the finest "traffic-lights" performance that I've heard of any Bruckner symphony, Caliban. As a pedestrian, I love traffic lights, as a Bruckner listener, I abhor them.

[jayne lee wilson]

Hmm... I remain unsure what you wanted this performance to be - on its own terms; as I said in my earlier posts (no. 10 etc.), there's a long and rich tradition of expressive and architectural pulse-variation in Bruckner performance (Knappertsbusch could be almost Quixotic sometimes (and not just in his choice of edition!!) but had a wonderful feel for spirit-not-letter, which I felt Salonen did) and Salonen at no point contradicted the narrative flow or structure of the piece in his tempo changes; they only emphasised them.

I do wonder whether the recording-collectors' tendency to measure a given performance against favourites, say HvK, Wand, Haitink or Klemperer) is subtly misleading in the judgement of the new. I wonder how the naysayers here would react to Venzago! Or for that matter, what ABOUT Jochum's often far more awkward shifts of tempi in many of his Bruckner symphony recordings (very odd given his naturally-evolving way with the Masses)? I can't see how Salonen was any less valid than these highly-regarded interpreters. Salonen's comments shouldn't be taken too literally - he also said that he disliked Bruckner being taken only as scenes from great Cathedrals or Alpine landscapes. You bet.

I could even see a crude but meaningful distinction between two schools of Bruckner interpretation; the one-basic-pulse, richly sonorous, more reverential approach; and a more freely expressive, often swifter, more individual way. But you simply have to refresh the interpretative approach to keep the music alive, rather than keeping it safe in a mitteleuropean museum...

[LaurieWatt]

Each to his own, of course!

[edashtav]

Hmm... I remain unsure what you wanted this performance to be - on its own terms; as I said in my earlier posts (no. 10 etc.), there's a long and rich tradition of expressive and architectural pulse-variation in Bruckner performance (Knappertsbusch could be almost Quixotic sometimes (and not just in his choice of edition!!) but had a wonderful feel for spirit-not-letter, which I felt Salonen did) and Salonen at no point contradicted the narrative flow or structure of the piece in his tempo changes; they only emphasised them.

I do wonder whether the recording-collectors' tendency to measure a given performance against favourites, say HvK, Wand, Haitink or Klemperer) is subtly misleading in the judgement of the new. I wonder how the naysayers here would react to Venzago! Or for that matter, what ABOUT Jochum's often far more awkward shifts of tempi in many of his Bruckner symphony recordings (very odd given his naturally-evolving way with the Masses)? I can't see how Salonen was any less valid than these highly-regarded interpreters. Salonen's comments shouldn't be taken too literally - he also said that he disliked Bruckner being taken only as scenes from great Cathedrals or Alpine landscapes. You bet.

I could even see a crude but meaningful distinction between two schools of Bruckner interpretation; the one-basic-pulse, richly sonorous, more reverential approach; and a more freely expressive, often swifter, more individual way. But you simply have to refresh the interpretative approach to keep the music alive, rather than keeping it safe in a mitteleuropean museum...

Each to his own, of course!

Your dictum is fine, Laurie, if there is choice. My observations over the last 5 to 10 years have indicated that younger conductors are mainly adopting the traffic lights approach, that they are brilliant over short stretches of music but lack longer vision of structure. E-P's comments indicate the problem. The old, strict tempi maestri are a dying breed. I'm finding increasing difficulty in sourcing live performances that conform to my needs. That's why I'm in the conversion business. I need to start a movement and convince young conductors that there are better ways of interpreting Bruckner.

The long tradition of which you speak, Jayne, I would regard as a false one, the result, sometimes, of feeling that Anton was an Austrian peasant who didn't know his own mind,was easy swayed by advice, did not commit his ideas clearly to paper, i.e. that his text could be "mucked about". My position is that Anton did know his own mind, wrote what he meant in his scores and that the conductor's job is to bring the scores alive without doing violence such as excessive fluctuations of tempo. Above all Bruckner needs patience, the music builds, builds again and comes, perhaps to an abrupt end. Silence ensues... Bruckner was a forward-looking composer and he frequently disposes of transitions. The translations between his monolithic blocks are not made smooth by bridge passages. Sometimes, I need to be made to wait!

Bob Simpson put this well in his little monograph written for the BBC before the first complete broadcast of his symphonies in Britain:

"The beauty and strength of his grandest conceptions amount to majesty and are achieved by patience. Music is one way of making significant our experience of time, the mature exercise of patience is another."

as for your observation, Jayne:

But you simply have to refresh the interpretative approach to keep the music alive, rather than keeping it safe in a mitteleuropean museum...

I agree, totally... but, hope that will be done by bringing alive what Bruckner wrote and not by assuming that it's open season to play fast, slow, or loose with his scores

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I haven't heard Salonen's performance, yet, and my Brucknerian preferences tend towards the Karajan/Klemperer schools - BUT, there is considerable evidence from today's scholars* that, whilst the cuts and reorchestrations of the first publications of the Bruckner Symphonies are execrable, the Tempo changes marked in them are based on what the composer stated he expected in rehearsals and how he played his works to students and friends. The fluctuations of Tempo may be exactly "what he meant in his scores", and didn't bother writing them in because this was how much (?all?) Music was generally performed in Vienna in the late Nineteenth Century - he knew of no other performing tradition. The conductors who have "adopted the traffic lights approach" in recent years (and Furtwangler, Jochum, and others, too) may be closer to the composer than those from the mid-Twentieth Century who took a single tempo, based on the scholarship of the Weimar Republic and its successor.

It all depends on how you define "excessive", I suppose.

*Best demonstrations of this known to me are these books:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=cambridge+Music+Guides%2C+bruckner#/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=cambridge+Music+handbook%2C+bruckner&rh=n%3A266239%2Ck%3Acambridge+Music+handbook%5Cc+bruckner

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bruckners-Symphonies-Analysis-Reception-Cultural/dp/0521081858/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1377885239&sr=1-2&keywords=bruckner+symphonies

[edashtav]

I haven't heard Salonen's performance, yet, and my Brucknerian preferences tend towards the Karajan/Klemperer schools - BUT, there is considerable evidence from today's scholars* that, whilst the cuts and reorchestrations of the first publications of the Bruckner Symphonies are execrable, the Tempo changes marked in them are based on what the composer stated he expected in rehearsals and how he played his works to students and friends. The fluctuations of Tempo may be exactly "what he meant in his scores", and didn't bother writing them in because this was how much (?all?) Music was generally performed in Vienna in the late Nineteenth Century - he knew of no other performing tradition. The conductors who have "adopted the traffic lights approach" in recent years (and Furtwangler, Jochum, and others, too) may be closer to the composer than those from the mid-Twentieth Century who took a single tempo, based on the scholarship of the Weimar Republic and its successor.

It all depends on how you define "excessive", I suppose.

*Best demonstrations of this known to me are these books:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=cambridge+Music+Guides%2C+bruckner#/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=cambridge+Music+handbook%2C+bruckner&rh=n%3A266239%2Ck%3Acambridge+Music+handbook%5Cc+bruckner

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Bruckners-Sy...ner+symphonies

Thanks for this "update", ferney.

I've scan read the second of these books in a library.

I must find the time to read both, properly.

I hero worshipped Bob Simpson and his ilk when young - maybe I'm stuck in a rut!

[jayne lee wilson]

Fret not, Ed - Robert Simpson's Essence of Bruckner has been a bible of mine for many years, since I first found it in the local music library when I fell in love with Bruckner as a teenager. He understands the musical processes of the great and humble Anton probably better than anyone...perhaps emphasises "majesty" and "grandeur" a bit too much? It's there, yes, but much more besides... as I said, I was very intransigent once about conductors deriving all - or seeming to - from one basic tempo (and Jochum's crashing the gears didn't encourage me to revise that view), but hearing more performances encouraged me to think again. Venzago (or even Knappertsbusch) can be a bit of a Pussy Riot in The Official Bruckner Cathedral - but really make you listen and think about cultural assumptions surrounding this composer.
On this forum I've often found myself defending Bruckner against the latter-day Hanslicks who see him as "turgid" or "lacking technique" etc.; or trying to clarify his complex and fluid structures, so different to sonata - I'm as devoted to the music as you evidently are and - yes, he really did know what he was doing!

I would urge you to try Venzago - but be prepared for a few shocks! The very beginning is a very good place to start (do-re-mi again) and Nos. 1 and 2 with the Tapiola Sinfonietta and the Northern Sinfonia are beautifully done, underlining the more lyrical links to Schubert. Lovely CPO cover art too.

[edashtav]

Pussy Riot in Linz Cathedral? Bring me Dr Venzago's Pills

Fret not, Ed - Robert Simpson's Essence of Bruckner has been a bible of mine for many years, since I first found it in the local music library when I fell in love with Bruckner as a teenager. He understands the musical processes of the great and humble Anton probably better than anyone...perhaps emphasises "majesty" and "grandeur" a bit too much? It's there, yes, but much more besides... as I said, I was very intransigent once about conductors deriving all - or seeming to - from one basic tempo (and Jochum's crashing the gears didn't encourage me to revise that view), but hearing more performances encouraged me to think again. Venzago (or even Knappertsbusch) can be a bit of a Pussy Riot in The Official Bruckner Cathedral - but really make you listen and think about cultural assumptions surrounding this composer.
On this forum I've often found myself defending Bruckner against the latter-day Hanslicks who see him as "turgid" or "lacking technique" etc.; or trying to clarify his complex and fluid structures, so different to sonata - I'm as devoted to the music as you evidently are and - yes, he really did know what he was doing!

I would urge you to try Venzago - but be prepared for a few shocks! The very beginning is a very good place to start (do-re-mi again) and Nos. 1 and 2 with the Tapiola Sinfonietta and the Northern Sinfonia are beautifully done, underlining the more lyrical links to Schubert. Lovely CPO cover art too.

MY HANDS ARE UP ! (The image of a Pussy Riot in Linz Cathedral has resulted in complete mental collapse.)

Please don't shoot any more bullets, Jayne.

I've ordered 2 packets of your medicine (0 & 1 ; 3 & 6 ) from Dr Venzago, & we'll see if they cure chronic "Essence of Simpson" .

[jayne lee wilson]

Well, Ed - there's a bullet for me ... I've had Venzago 3&6 sitting there in cellophane for many weeks, pushed aside by life, Proms and other reveries, troubles & passions...
Better get on with them now hadn't I? (And - OMG - Venzago uses my detested 1889 3rd - I knew before I bought it, only Venzago, after 0,1,2,4,7 could have got me to do that...).

AS for what you'll make of them...why isn't there a "take cover" emoticon? I better just say in advance!