Austria St Florianer Brucknertage – Bruckner: Altomonte Orchestra / Rémy Ballot (conductor). St Florian Monastery, Austria, 23 & 24.8.2024. (KW)
Bruckner – Fragments of the Finale of the Ninth Symphony (with spoken introduction and commentary by Prof. Felix Diergarten); Symphony No. 9.
This concert was dedicated to the memory of the founder of the Altomonte Orchestra, a cellist and a delightful, friendly and cheerful man, Thomas Wall, who died in May this year. The concert took place in the magnificent Baroque monastery of St Florian, in the context of the St Florianer Brucknertage, an inspired, welcoming, small-scale festival devoted to the music of Anton Bruckner, this time celebrating the composer’s 200th anniversary. The Ninth Symphony was performed twice to sell-out audiences.
Eight fragments of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony finale were played to begin the concert. That this is three more than other performances of the fragments – Nikolaus Harnoncourt with the Vienna Philharmonic, Peter Hirsch with the Berlin Radio SO, for example – signifies not that there was more of the finale played, but the opposite: the determination to play only notes actually written by Bruckner meant that slightly augmented passages that were in those other performances were excluded here. Rémy Ballot and the Altomonte Orchestra performed what remained with their customary breadth and intensity and the fragments sounded wonderful, more telling than I have heard them before, the music full of pathos.
They carry so much baggage with them, these fragments – the knowledge that these are the last efforts of the dying composer, some of the music very strange, to close an already immense and challenging symphony; the faith that Bruckner would have managed the transfiguration of this material to constitute that final hallelujah which reportedly would close the work; the outrage that there was no-one who thought it important enough to preserve what was written from the moment the composer died, to prevent pages being given away or just taken as souvenirs by the ghoulishly intrusive visitors to the composer’s deathbed, such manuscripts as survived distributed to many and various locations. These silences and disfiguring lacunae speak volumes about the circumstances of Bruckner’s final days and how the demise of the great composer seems not to have been treated with the sort of conscientious respect for his effects that would have been appropriate. As you hear this extraordinary music stutter to a halt, you hear that history overlaid on the purely musical content.
As conducted by Ballot, and as presented here, Bruckner’s music was very compelling, the opening theme unsettled and dramatic, the undecorated Gesangsperiode heart-rending in its bare, repetitive, and exhausted simplicity, the chorale blazing but somehow fatalistic in its descent. The trumpet fanfare introducing the fugue came across as a call to attention far stronger than in many performances of the various completions, Bruckner proudly announcing the display of contrapuntal learning that had played such a role in his career – but suddenly the heart of it is missing. And the last notes, repeated Beethovenian hammering, just maybe announcing that things can be turned round and the ascent to a glorious hallelujah is just around the corner… but we don’t know as there is only silence. I found the performance of these fragments intensely moving.
They had been introduced with commentary by Dr Felix Diergarten in German.
The performance of the three complete movements of the symphony that followed after a pause of two or three minutes, was a great, slow, juggernaut of a performance. Wonderfully impressive was the sheer sound of the orchestra at full pelt, triple forte tuttis, not merely reverberated all around the church but, incredibly, were full of detail, it seemed that the balance had been so well rehearsed and the tempo so measured that you could hear every strand – the effect was shattering. The two Gesangsperioden of the first movement, exposition and recapitulation, were absolutely ravishing, very passionate, very slow. They were like great glistening lakes of deep lyricism nestling within the severe rocky and mountainous landscape. With slow inevitability the first movement coda arose at a rock steady pace that enabled the details of the great build up, magnificently fractured by sudden caesura and resumption, to register clearly through the reverberant acoustic.
The Scherzo thundered in the vast space of the Abbey with indomitable power, relieved only by the dancey solos of oboe, clarinet and flute, each time exceptionally well played, an enigmatic brief respite from the great thumping of the Scherzo theme. The leap of a ninth on the violins, the opening gesture of the Adagio, was accomplished with arresting precision, no sliding around up and down the large intervals. After the rich tones of the ‘farewell to life’ chorale, the second theme was again very slow, with a deep sadness at the heart of it. Very strong on the first night’s performance, not quite so clear on the second, was that final quarter note of excruciating dissonance that crowns the climax of the Adagio, kept short, strictly as marked in the score, followed by a long pause. The effect was absolutely devastating. The Wagner tubas, trombones and horns held their closing E major chord as though for ever – and ever. And we all sat in deep silence until the performers finally relaxed.
Those familiar with Rémy Ballot’s previous performances in his Bruckner cycle will not have been surprised by the generally slow tempos, nor the intensity of the playing and the magnificence of the sound. There were aspects that, to my ears, did not work quite so well. The opening paragraph should perhaps have two trajectories: it has as its destination the cataclysmic octave drop unison climax, and it commences that immense arc that reaches to the end of the first movement coda – even to the non-existent end of the symphony. I don’t know what was lacking, at least as I perceived it: maybe it was too much observation of slow detail, maybe not enough freedom given to the orchestra to play on, but the long line to these ultimate points didn’t seem to register.
The Gesangsperioden, although wondrous as I have described, seemed to stand alone as though in some sort of parentheses. The transition or introduction to the third theme was a point almost of stasis in which I couldn’t feel the pull of the formal coherence of the movement. For all its thunder, one felt an unwanted element of control in the Scherzo, not quite wild enough, and the Trio sounded rather heavy, not spooky enough.
Come the end of the three movements, trying in the silence to digest what had just happened, I felt the interpretation hadn’t quite generated a coherent presentation of the life force that animates this brink-of-death symphony.
Ken Ward