This isn’t a completely successful Bruckner Fifth, but it is an interesting one. The biggest problems occur in the first movement, where Sinopoli executes what can only be called a “reverse Horenstein” maneuver (or maybe a Klemperer with a half-twist in a pike position) playing the whole movement in close to a single tempo. The problem is that both Horenstein and Klemperer usually brought the slower parts up to the speed of the (moderately) quicker ones, and while not exactly orthodox or what the composer ordered, this approach works while Sinopoli’s tactic–slow everything down to (more or less) the tempo of the introduction–does not. (For those curious about Horenstein’s generally excellent version, click on “Search Reviews” and input q1514 in the search box to jump directly to that review.) Even more significant than matters of tempo, Sinopoli can’t resist micro-managing dynamics and phrasing within each section. This brings an amazing amount of color to, say, the first movement’s second subject, and reveals countless small orchestral details (the excellent balances and clarity of the playing are both really impressive). But all of this fiddling sacrifices momentum to the exigencies of the moment, and nothing really connects. There’s little sense of forward movement or developmental logic.
However, after a flat opening movement, the adagio is simply gorgeous, the warmth and poise of those fantastic Dresden strings in the second theme sounding absolutely right in their depth and solemnity. Sinopoli similarly offers an aptly fantastical scherzo, choosing two clearly contrasted basic tempos and effortlessly handling the transitions between them. What is it, then, about sonata-form movements that many of today’s conductors find so difficult to manage? Take the finale. The first subject group, with its fugal exposition, needs more gruffness. Sinopoli’s light approach misses some of the music’s humor, while the second subject’s Mendelssohnian skittishness and transparency of texture shortchanges the music’s lyric expansiveness. The great central double fugue lacks rhetorical force: the two subjects don’t argue the merits of their respective themes with sufficient conviction. Similarly, when that unison third subject returns for the last time, Sinopoli pulls the dynamics back much too forcefully so as not to cover the first movement’s principal theme on the upper woodwind. Here he should simply reinforce the winds or have them play really loudly (which they clearly aren’t), rather than suck the energy out of the passage in question.
For all of these problems, though, Sinopoli gathers up the threads for a very satisfying final peroration, which features excellent separation of brass timbres and some nicely incisive rhythmic playing from the trombones. It’s so successful, in fact, that you can’t help but wonder why he didn’t achieve the same results in the rest of the symphony. Sinopoli was an intellectual, a man of many ideas, and however interesting those ideas were, it seems that in this case some of them were clearly at odds with Bruckner’s. Still, for the excellent playing, the pellucid if slightly cool recorded sound, and the sheer lightness of touch Sinopoli brings to a work that in heavier hands practically defines the word “lumbering”, this disc may challenge some Brucknerian preconceptions about how the music should go. As I said, I’m not wholly convinced, but it’s still not an interpretation to be dismissed out of hand.
