Bruckner Ninth from the Concertgebouw Orchestra

Beethoven Piano Concerto No 1 (1800)
Bruckner Symphony No 9 (1896)

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam
Mariss Jansons conductor
Lars Vogt piano

Barbican Hall, London, 5 April 2014
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The final concert of the Jansons/Concertgebouw Orchestra 3 day residency at the Barbican started with Beethoven's perennnially fresh First Piano Concerto.  At the piano was the thoughtful, refined and impish pianism of Lars Vogt.  As with the other nights the soloist was beyond reproach.  Vogt had particular fun projecting the Beethovenian humour in the first movement coda: teasing the audience with when it was going to end, and striving for maximum surprise when Beethoven throws out fortissimo chords after quiet interludes.  The Concertgebouw Orchestra were again attentive and cultured partners, with anything that the clarinet or oboe touched turning to musical gold.

And so the visit concluded with the last Bruckner symphony - the mighty, unfinished 9th.   What a composition this is and how very worthy a successor of that other D Minor work - the Beethoven Ninth Symphony.  The Barbican crowd was expectant– not least Jansons’ wife and the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s manager seated next to me.  

This was again a performance of exalted technical quality and Jansons’ usual attention to detail.  Speeds were brisk, and in the Scherzo there was some bizarre handling of tempo at the start which slowed up for the pounding bass notes, before regaining the original tempo as the first violins re-entered.  It was obviously prepared as such, but why?  The great Adagio developed to a massive climax and the final closing notes were wonderfully sustained by strings and brass.  What a sound the Concertgebouw Orchestra produce when on their game.

Mariss Jansons

This Bruckner residency never fell below the very high standards to be expected from the Jansons/Concertgebouw dream-team.  Jansons approach was beautifully crafted and detailed.  The sheer beauty of sound on offer will not be easily forgotten.  Ultimately that this was not a revelatory experience comes down to Jansons not being the most natural of Brucknerians.  Movements did not accumulate like they do at their best, tempi were a little too forced to allow maximum expression, and the structural sense was not as assured as that of a Skrowaczewski.   

 

Bruckner's gravestone

The applause at the end from the Barbican audience after the Bruckner was long and enthusiastic, but stopped short of a standing ovation.  Probably about right.   In the end it was the concerti that struck one as closer to ideal.  Thinking back over the three partnerships with Lars Vogt, Truls Mork and Frank Peter Zimmermann, I wouldn’t change a single aspect of any of them.

Haydn overshadows Bruckner

Haydn Cello Concerto in C (1765)
Bruckner Symphony No 7 (1883)

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam
Mariss Jansons conductor
Truls Mørk cello

Barbican Hall, London, 4 April 2014
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The residency of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra at the Barbican continued with the Bruckner Seventh Symphony.  Before that we were again treated to an immaculately presented classical concerto.  Tonight the Haydn C Major Cello Concerto.  Truls Mork was an ideal soloist, pure toned and elegant.  The easy rapport with the Dutch orchestra was again plain, and the whole performance projected a pleasing sense of joy in this delightful music.

With the Bruckner results were more uneven.  I had high hopes that the eloquence of the Concertgebouw strings would thrive in this most lyrical of Bruckner symphonies.  In the end, some of the shortcomings that were minor blots on the previous evening were now more troublesome.  The opening movement was rather brisk, and never allowed to breath naturally or achieve its full measure of grandeur.  Individual sections were carefully shaped but the whole never cohered.  By contrast, the great Adagio was thrilling, driven by the utterly glorious sound of the Concertgebouw Orchestra.  The strings were particularly impassioned and the famous climax (complete with triangle) was beautifully shaped.  Jansons again revealed himself unafraid of the pastoral interludes in the Scherzo which were lovingly done.  However the Finale never gained traction.  It is, of course, one of Bruckner's least successful movements, but the feeling that the wood had been lost for the trees was strong.

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra at home in the Concertgebouw main hall in Amsterdam.

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.