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Tepid Bruckner from Jansons and the RCO

David Hurwitz

Artistic Quality:

Sound Quality:

The deluge of Bruckner symphony releases continues, having all of the appeal and value for the recording industry of a bloom of jellyfish clogging the intake pipes of a power plant. The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, of course, has a long and proud tradition of playing these works, and from a purely technical point of view it’s difficult to get a poor performance from them. The players know the music too well. They have recorded complete cycles under Haitink and Chailly–well, almost complete in the latter case since he had two orchestras, but close enough. Both of those conductors had a genuine feeling for Bruckner. Jansons does not, but like so many modern conductors, he plays the music anyway because he can, and because he probably feels that he’s supposed to. However pleasant the experience may have been live (and I saw his Bruckner Seventh last year), that’s not excuse enough to justify yet another Bruckner cycle on disc.

The best thing about this version of the Sixth Symphony is the flowing, very beautiful Adagio. The rest is simply fast. All the climaxes are underplayed. The first-movement recapitulation, one of the great moments in any Bruckner symphony, whizzes by all but unnoticed. In the coda of the finale Jansons makes no effort to sort out the brass timbres as the symphony’s main theme returns for the last time. The result has all the flavor and appeal of lukewarm soup. You listen with frustration, waiting for him to do something captivating, but the performance grinds forward mechanically, impersonally, and ultimately dully, despite its fleetness.

Jansons plays the Seventh a bit more effectively. The music’s long-breathed lyricism seems to determine its own tempos. You can’t just push through it like an explorer hacking his way through a thicket with a machete–not that Jansons doesn’t try in the scherzo and the finale. To his credit, he notices that the coda of the first movement contains one of the most glorious climaxes in symphonic music, and the Adagio, as in the Sixth, features some truly luminous playing from the orchestra’s strings and brass. So for two-thirds of the way the performance sounds good, but in the scherzo there’s little trace of the music’s rustic edge, and the finale, with its peculiar Brucknerian humor, goes right over Jansons’ head. He plays it straight, and flat.

Bruckner’s music is easy to present in the sense that its eight-bar phrases and “sound block” approach to form, never mind its generally slowish tempos, encourage conductors who want to play German-style music without having to worry about larger questions of shape and syntax. When it comes to the basics of tone and texture, the orchestra knows what to do, but there’s a dead spot at the center of these performances and it comes from the non-happenings on the podium. Even a great Bruckner orchestra such as the Concertgebouw can’t supply the vision missing from Jansons’ “Bruckner Lite” approach to the music, and God knows the last thing we need is yet more tepid Bruckner on disc. We’ve all been there, and heard that.


Recording Details:

Reference Recording: No. 6: Klemperer (EMI); Wand (RCA); No. 7: Jochum (EMI); Haitink II (Philips)

  • Record Label: RCO - 14005
  • Medium: SACD

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