Jansons' Bruckner residency at the Barbican

Mozart Violin Concerto in G major (1775)
Bruckner Symphony No 4 in E flat (1880)

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam
Mariss Jansons conductor
Frank Peter Zimmermann violin

Barbican Hall, London, 3 April 2014

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Anton Bruckner

The great Mariss Jansons is best known for his interpretations of composers like Sibelius, Dvorak, Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Beethoven.  However in recent years he has increased his attention for Austrian composer Anton Bruckner.  Was it his brush with death 18 years ago that triggered this, when he had a heart attack on the podium conducting La Boheme?  Whatever the case, this most spiritual of composers was front and centre for the 3 concert residency of Jansons and his Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra at London's Barbican. Each night, the great symphonies 4, 7 and 9 were leavened by 3 classical concerti of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.

Having Frank Peter Zimmerman, Jansons and this wonder-orchestra lavishing such attention on one of Mozart's lesser moments was certainly an indulgence.  But when the performance was so graceful, relaxed and poised, it came to seem a blessing rather than a waste.  Zimmerman was equally refined and intimate in his Bach encore.

The Bruckner Fourth Symphony so strongly evokes  German romantic moments set in forests and valleys, one can understand why a descriptive programme circulated on its release referencing hunting scenes, knight processions, medieval worlds...  Its opening must be one of music's most famous - a distant horn sounding across the musical landscape.

But that start was not auspicious.  The first horn splitting several notes only bars in.  Was it the ultra-dry Barbican Hall that unsettled him?  Bruckner wanted his symphonies played in cathedrals with their long reverberations.  Acoustically, the Barbican is a kind of anti-Bruckner hall. Whatever the case, the orchestra seemed to be slightly tentative and adjusting to the sound of the hall in the first movement.  

With the second movement the sound changed entirely: more blended, filling the hall more naturally.  In this movement, the nocturnal funeral march, almost imperceptibly Jansons drew us in until something at once beautiful and disquieting was in control.  This was his genius to draw out not only the village-pastoral simplicity of the dance motifs (here truly enjoyed) but also the ghostly, spirit-inhabited underworld of the Austrian forests of legend.  

Jansons' Bruckner starts off on the human scale.  His best moments were frequently bringing out the simple, village delights.  But this Andante brought an authentic sense of unease.  Its pastoral spirituality encountered the numinous but also the unknown, malevolent spirits of the mythic forest world, where humans can be tempted and brought undone.  It was classic Jansons: drawing out and making plain the logic, beauty and power of the "lesser" internal moments of the big symphonies.

The Scherzo was then on the surface the world of hunting calls, but also carrying a disturbing quality.  Jansons was totally at ease in the contrasting trio; bucolic and exuberant.  His Bruckner is not "cosmic", gazing down from the planets.  He embraces the pastoral v spiritual contrasts in the music but also attempts to make their rhetorical register not too far apart.

The great struggle to find a conclusion which is the last movement then carried extra weight of meaning after the darker experiences of those internal movements.  And this was Bruckner, so all of the previous 60 minutes then emptied into the great final coda, here quite electrifying.  The whole unfolding darkly, as if (as Jansons said in a recent interview) “God was wagging his figure at the the world. He was saying ‘you better be careful, you will be penalised if you continue in that direction’”.   Here the orchestra sound was at its finest: eloquent, rounded, the woodwind and brass playing through the string sound.  These Bruckner codas are some of the finest music on earth, and this performance entirely worthy of it.