Gerd Schaller is a sensitive and idiomatic Bruckner conductor, but he has caught Bruckneritus, the uncontrollable urge to perform a stupid new edition of one of the major symphonies. In this case, we have William Carragan’s lovingly restored and utterly pointless version of something that never in fact existed: the alleged “variant of 1888” of the Eighth Symphony. This consists of pencil sketches of a not-fully-revised first movement and scherzo, an independent score of the Adagio in an unknown hand but with some marginal notations by Bruckner, and (most unforgivably) a wholly conjectural de-revision of the finale conjured out of thin air by Carragan himself simply by ignoring a selection of Bruckner’s final intentions more or less at random. The result is an atrocity, an absurdity, and a farce.
So let us be clear, there is virtually nothing here that you won’t find in either of the two versions of the symphony that Bruckner himself actually wrote, save that the text is distorted like a cob salad with too much bleu cheese on top. We get the same ingredients that we normally expect, only with smelly bits that pop out unpleasantly where you least expect them. The parts that are different, such as a tentative approach to the climax of the Adagio (two cymbal crashes this time), contribute nothing except frustration. Indeed, what most of this tinkering reveals is just how ineffective so many of these provisional ideas actually are, and consequently how uninteresting Bruckner’s compositional process truly is.
This live performance is well paced, but cavernously recorded. The end of the first movement (still the original, unconvincing loud one) sounds like one giant, immobile chord, held forever. So does the coda of the finale, and the (in this version) dynamically monotonous scherzo. The brass get lost in the haze, the strings are too far forward, and Schaller isn’t helped by the dense, less focused scoring. In general, we are closer to Bruckner’s timbrally less effective first version of the symphony than to his sharply etched, final revision.
The Bruckner disease percolating through the classical music world today is more than demented. It exists to give musicologists and wannabe composers something to do by parasitically attaching themselves to the coattails of a major composer. Bruckner isn’t great enough to generate much righteous indignation at this nonsense from the wider musical public. Just imagine, for example, what would happen if someone deconstructed the finale of Beethoven’s Ninth and tried to publish as a new edition every version of the recitatives in the finale that preceded the entry of the voices, along with every variant of the “joy” theme. We’d be appalled, and rightly so. Such things are fine for study, but they can’t be said to do any sort of justice to the vision of the composer, and neither does this foolishness. But it’s Bruckner, so normal people don’t care and cultists drool over every meaningless adjustment to the basic text.
There’s also an oddly apt coupling: Funeral Music to the Memory of Bruckner by one Otto Kitzler. Actually, there were two Otto Kitzlers, father and son. No one knows who wrote the work; it only survives as a piano score, orchestrated here by Gerd Schaller. The piece has a couple of bars that sound kind of like Bruckner, but it’s dull, repetitious, and resolutely uninteresting. It does, however, make a fitting conclusion to the disc: a conjectural encore to the performance of a non-existent symphony.
