Germany Haydn, Bruckner: Sebastian Berner (trumpet) Philharmonie Festiva / Gerd Schaller (conductor). Regentenbau, Bad Kissingen, 16.3.2025. (KW)
Haydn – Trumpet concerto in E-flat major
Bruckner – Symphony No.3 in D minor (First version, 1873)
Had Bruckner heard a performance such as this, played with such precision and commitment by the Philharmonie Festiva, and received so enthusiastically by the audience, maybe he would never have changed a note, we might have lived happily forever after without the second and third versions – not to mention the extra Adagio of 1876. The symphony in this account was spellbinding throughout, from the magical, atmospheric tracery with which it begins all the way through to the blazing transfiguration with which it ends – but it was the Finale that truly clinched the argument, that suddenly elevated the whole work to a mighty and a heroic tour de force.
This extraordinary triumph was built mainly on the sheer Beethovenian energy of that Finale, on Gerd Schaller’s ability to keep the pulse incisive and urgent, often signalling to the double basses with strong gestures how determined their rhythmic underpinning must be, maintaining the crisp pizzicatos under the polka and the extended chorale passages. Bruckner’s off-beat, syncopated, treatment of the third theme was presented without a hint of embarrassment, the orchestra responding with sustained virtuosic precision – there was no doubt this was how the music was meant to be. And there was no doubt about the form, no sense of disintegration, all the wildness of the movement held securely in place by Schaller’s long view of its shape and destination.
In the context of such a committed and persuasive performance it was never an option to doubt Bruckner’s intentions: he meant what he said – those dramatic and sudden changes in dynamic, blazing fortissimos brought to a sudden halt, a pause for a quiet meditative fragment, then a sudden return of the fortissimo; those weird, almost modernistic, chaotic intrusions of the brass and wind in the stormy development; that famous conjunction of polka and chorale – and much else that in less well-rehearsed performances, in performances that treat the Finale as something more to be endured than celebrated, can seem questionable. But the only question here was why we hadn’t heard it like this, understood it like this, before?
The Finale was definitely a highlight, but that is not to detract from the high quality of the performance of the three preceding movements. The tempo was always judiciously chosen, without the need for disruptive gear changes or the imposition of dramatic effects not apparent in the score. Particularly impressive was Schaller’s and the orchestra’s ability to pace the crescendo in the massive build-ups – Bruckner’s Steigerungen – steadily and purposefully increasing volume, they never peaked too early, the loudest music arising perfectly at the last measure of the passage, and the following grand statement, or dramatic silence, all the more effective as a result. Although this is the longest of the three versions of the symphony, a vast symphonic construction of 2052 bars, its formal coherence was never in doubt: Schaller’s presentation of the structure seemed faultless.
In the clear and rather dry acoustic of the Regentenbau, the orchestral sound was resplendent, the brass glistened, the woodwind sang their chorales and their solos immaculately, and strings were often caressingly beautiful. The orchestral balance was, on the whole, exemplary. Only in Bruckner’s first movement unison theme – those two fortissimo descending gestures – especially on its reappearance in the recapitulation, the strings carrying the melodic line became inaudible beneath the loud brass chords. The fault may not have been the performers: Bruckner reorchestrated this passage in his revision.
Usually, in the Adagio, the theme marked Langsamer. Misterioso, which Bruckner reportedly said was in memory of his mother, is played as a halting, hesitating mystery. But there is nothing in the score to say that the notes should be separated, apart from the two quaver rests, and accordingly Schaller had his players play them sostenuto, with a view to keeping the deep-breathed, long line of the music intact. It gave the passage great tenderness.
The Scherzo was riveting – both in the tense precision of the pianissimo repartee between second violins and pizzicato cellos and double basses with which it opens, and in the energetic, irregular thumping fortissimos, which Bruckner was to tame somewhat in his subsequent revisions. The lilting accenting of the dance melody of the Trio was utterly beguiling.
As the end of the symphony approaches, the trumpet motto theme from the very beginning sounds out through the maelstrom of the movement’s main theme. The music falls quiet and in the hushed silence a fragment of the triplet-duplet Gesangsperiode from the first movement steals in, then the Adagio main theme and then a little snippet from the Scherzo – as the late Prof. William Carragan wrote in his book Anton Bruckner – Eleven Symphonies, this is like Beethoven quoting earlier themes at the beginning of the Finale of his Ninth, ‘but with a very different purpose’. One wonders what that purpose might be in Bruckner’s Third. Certainly they are not there to be dismissed, as in Beethoven, ‘Nicht diese Töne’, but I think they may be there remind us and reassert the extraordinary scale and variety of the journey, over 2000 bars, and in so doing help to power and justify the glorious, transcendent close of the symphony.
From this performance I came to think that this was Bruckner’s Eroica – not just for its dedication to Bruckner’s hero, Wagner, nor just because of the heroic themes and Beethovenian energy that coursed through the performance, but as with Beethoven, the sheer heroism of the composer as he struck out into new territory and found his own voice. And this was a performance that revealed that voice in all its endlessly intriguing complexity and manifold splendour.
Wagner, much impressed by the opening theme of this symphony, was reportedly wont to call its composer ‘Bruckner the Trumpet’, hence it was perhaps appropriate that the symphony should be preceded by a genial performance of Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto, followed by a reflective encore, Entsagung (Renunciation) by Oskar Böhme.
Ken Ward