Ferdinand Leitner leads a solid, very traditional Bruckner Sixth with judiciously chosen tempos, an eloquently sung slow movement, and a touch of stodginess in the finale. The SWR brass section in 1982 doesn’t always distinguish itself–not that the players miss notes, but they lack the bravura that Bruckner’s writing ideally demands. Still, few performances clarify the final bars to produce such a satisfying culmination, and the bottom line is that this substantial coupling to the superb performance of the Hartmann will disappoint few listeners.
Amazingly, Hartmann’s extraordinary symphony enjoys several fine recordings, including preeminently recent issues by Botstein (Telarc) and Metzmacher (EMI). After an intense opening Adagio, its second movement consists of a series of fugal variations (the subject of each fugue is a variation of the initial subject), and despite the fact that the music is basically atonal, on first hearing the form strikes the listener as crystal clear, its progress simply exciting as hell. Hartmann had the secret of building successive climaxes, each more powerful than the one preceding, with something always held in reserve in order to ratchet the tension up to a higher level. Few composers prove so exhilarating and display such joy in the sheer kinetic power of the orchestra.
Leitner’s credentials as a “structural” conductor, so evident in his Bruckner, serve him ideally in music that sounds wild but in reality requires an extremely disciplined approach to tempo and dynamics. He builds the first movement’s central climax with inexorable force and perfectly judges the tempos of the finale’s successive fugues, making clear the thematic relationships between them while at the same time never holding back the headlong rush to the final bars.
The SWR engineers offer solidly impactful sonics, with powerful bass and careful (if obviously multi-miked) balances between sections. The prominence of the piano and mallet instruments may strike you as odd, but it certainly clarifies Hartmann’s incredibly complex textures–and it’s obvious that Leitner knows where to lead your ear at any given time. The playing also sounds more confident than in the Bruckner, though this may stem from the kaleidoscopic nature of Hartmann’s orchestration, with no single timbre dominating the texture for any prolonged period. An impressive release, well worth a serious listen.
