Marek Janowski’s Bruckner Eighth was wonderful, and the preservation on disc of a great performance needs no justification. This one is another story entirely, and it begs the musical question: Who is listening to this stuff? Bruckner always has been something of a cult composer, and he remains one. I know this risks offending diehard Brucknerites, but they’re already annoyed with me for trashing Benjamin Korstvedt’s abominable score of Bruckner’s Fourth, so their opinion doesn’t matter. Let’s be clear: Bruckner is not the next Mahler. He enjoys some popularity among contemporary conductors because he’s a heavyweight romantic tonal composer whose music can, from a certain angle, be viewed as a sort of forerunner of the non-sonata, “rotating chunk” modern school of musical form. He’s an easy read for conductors with basic time-beating skills and a good brass section. In music, a cold and lazy lack of expressiveness can pass itself off as “spirituality”. Hence the current Bruckner glut.
Of course, there’s more to the music than that, as great Bruckner conductors as diverse as Jochum, Karajan, and Wand have shown. Janowski also is a serious musician, but this performance is weird. The first movement is generally swift and light, until the very slow coda with its oddly recessed and subdued brass. That’s right, Bruckner with timid brass. The Adagio, similarly, goes well until the climax, which singularly fails to build, nor does the coda have the requisite sombre weight. A quick scherzo leads to a depressingly slow and lumpish finale, despite a characterful principal clarinet at the opening.
Granted, this symphony distributes its tensions oddly. It really has two long slow movements followed by two short quick ones, and yet it works. It seems that Janowski doesn’t quite trust Bruckner’s genius here, and his effort to lighten the first pair of movements while beefing up the second fights the music’s natural expressive flow. The sonics, ample and spacious, lovely if Janowski had permitted that glowing, rich Bruckner sonority to fill the space, also tend to work against the approach. In short, this is an interpretation and production at war with itself on many levels. It never should have been released. There’s barely enough enthusiasm in the musical world for great Bruckner, never mind this sort of thing.
