Bruckner: Symphony No 9 - Rattle, Berlin Philharmoniker (2012)

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Bruckner: Symphony No 9 - Rattle, Berlin Philharmoniker (2012)

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Sir Simon Rattle conducts the Berliner Philharmoniker in Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 including the world premiere of the latest scholarly revision of the fourth movement that the composer left unfinished at his death.

Sir Simon and the Orchestra unveiled the new version at Berlin’s Philharmonie in early February 2012 and at New York’s Carnegie Hall the same month. “It was fascinating to hear this monumental symphony performed with [its new] final movement. After a quizzical opening and a strong statement of the main theme there are stretches of fitful counterpoint, brass chorales and ruminative passages that take you by surprise. Overall the music pulses with a hard-wrought insistence that crests with a hallelujah coda.”

Composer: Anton Bruckner
Conductor: Simon Rattle
Orchestra/Ensemble: Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Reviews: There are many myths concerning Bruckner’s finales, not the least of which is that they are somehow “problematic”. Not true. After the Fourth Symphony, each is perfectly appropriate in its own way to the work in question, and the lesson we learn from the Eighth Symphony is that any issues concerning the length and structure of the finale are no less applicable to the work’s other movements as well. The finale of the Ninth in this version lasts 653 bars, of which 96 are completely conjectural, having been filled in by the editorial team of Samale, Phillips, Cohrs, and Mazzuca. Bruckner left 440 bars in score, and 117 bars in sketch. This is a lot of authentic Bruckner, but the numbers remain deceptive.

The fact is that anyone can write fake Bruckner. When a composer has a distinctive sound, as Bruckner certainly does, pastiche composing is a simple thing. It is the strokes of genius, the leaps into the unknown, those moments where the idiom moves into new terrain, that can’t be anticipated or copied. It therefore follows that the problems with this finale are just as likely to arise out of original material that Bruckner wrote down but was not able to bang into final shape because he had not yet grasped its full implications, as from those less important bits of his usual stuff that he never committed to paper at all.

There are moments that sound unquestionably idiomatic: you can hear one from about 14 minutes in if you sample the sound clip below. Others, equally “idiomatic” technically speaking, are simply unconvincing, such as the return of the opening movement’s unison theme at the very end. This is a cheap tactic, and while Bruckner does it all the time, and may well have thought about doing it again, making this tune the “bad guy” whose rather too easy defeat precedes the final victorious apotheosis comes off as a mere cliché. Then there is the terribly fragmented, stop-and-start character of the second subject material after the (inevitable) unison theme near the movement’s opening. Again, this may be all Bruckner, but it comes very close to self-parody, and it may be one of those things that he would have adjusted on reflection. Or maybe not. We can’t know.

What about the performance? I purchased (please note) this disc full of trepidation, because although there’s no question that the Berlin Philharmonic remains one of the world’s great orchestras, Simon Rattle has so consistently failed to live up to his much vaunted reputation that it was difficult to work up much enthusiasm for this release. However, while not perfect, it’s good to be able to report that both Rattle and the ensemble do some excellent work, certainly some of their best so far. The basic sonority actually comes close to what Karajan used to offer: a spectacularly rich cushion of strings that promises much and delivers in full in the Adagio, but that tends to obscure some rhythmic detail in the tuttis. Thus, the dotted-rhythm brass exchanges in the horns and trombones in the first movement’s coda become undifferentiated blobs of harmony, and the loud outbursts in the scherzo lack timbral differentiation. At lower volume levels, though, the playing is gorgeous in all departments.

As for Rattle’s approach, he deserves credit for having conceived the interpretation so as to project the work as a genuine, four-movement symphony. The tendency over the years has been to balance the piece with the adagio in mind as the finale, which means a long, slow first movement as a counterbalance. Rattle takes the opening movement and finale at similar speeds. Both last about 23 minutes, the Adagio a bit longer, making it the natural focal point of the work. The result makes perfect sense structurally, and the result is very intelligent and wholly convincing. Whether or not you find the finale completely satisfying, Rattle’s view of how it fits into the symphony’s larger scheme is surely the right one. Ultimately, then, this is a release that no Bruckner fan can afford to miss, and we should take a moment to give due credit to the team of Samale, Phillips, Cohrs, and Mazzuca for their sensitive work on Bruckner’s score, as well as to Rattle and Berlin for displaying the results in such a positive light.