A breath of fresh air blows through St Florian Bruckner Days with Katharina Wincor

Austria St Florianer Brucknertage 2025 – Brahms, Bruckner: Altomonte Orchestra / Katharina Wincor (conductor). Sankt Florian, 22.8.2025. (KW)

Brahms – Variations on a theme of Haydn’s, Op.56a
Bruckner – Symphony No.6

For many years the St Florianer Brucknertage, a very special and always enjoyable week-long festival at St Florian, the monastery where Bruckner was brought up, has hosted performances that have embraced the spirit of Celibidache’s Bruckner – often very slow, and always with an air of deep, spiritual profundity. From the last decade emerged an exceptional set of award-winning recordings on the Gramola label of the complete cycle of numbered symphonies conducted by Rémy Ballot.  Maestro Ballot has moved on, and the orchestra that developed under his leadership has lost some of its members, now replaced with new talent.

And suddenly the conductor is somebody in every way totally new, Katharina Wincor, a young woman not yet thirty, with a totally refreshing approach. In conversation with her, when mention was made of different editions of Bruckner’s Third Symphony which she is to conduct next year, she dismissed the concern with the comment, ‘Give me a score, and I will conduct it.’  To us version-obsessed Brucknerians, a welcome dose of honest pragmatism!  It was an approach that was on display in the joyful, passionate and energetic performance she elicited from the Altomonte Orchestra, somehow totally unselfconscious, forthright, direct and seemingly unconcerned with all that baggage of heavy seriousness that Bruckner is often made to carry.

It was the opinion of the late Dr Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs that the Sixth Symphony was an A major symphony in the mould of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, that it should go with similar swing and vitality, and Wincor showed that such an approach can pay great dividends.  I am an old man, soon to be eighty, but I came out of this splendid performance with a new spring in my step and youthful smile on my face. One couldn’t ask for anything more!

It is necessary in a review to remark that the orchestra were not always all together as they should be, and some problems of balance in the cavernous St Florian acoustic might have been better addressed, but in truth these things don’t matter, especially in a live performance. So the opening rhythm, pianissimo on the violins, was not always clearly enunciated by all the players together and the reverberation muddied it further, but what we had was the rhythm at a sprightly tempo and sometimes just a general agitation, but it worked well. The cellos and double basses, the latter ranged in a row along the back, jauntily brought in the main theme and the movement took flight, a sprightly and triumphant Majestoso.

Wincor kept the tempo going into the second theme, Gesangsperiode, and at that moment when the lyrical theme is repeated after a chorale-like interlude, she encouraged the orchestra with animated gestures to a very passionate response, the music taking on an almost Mahlerian hyper-expressiveness. There was really no let-up in the energetic progress of the movement, and no need to observe Bruckner’s accelerando into the recapitulation as we were already moving at speed. The famous, expansive all-embracing first movement coda was all that it should be, majestic and visionary.

I love the plaintive oboe solo that enters shortly after the strings begin the wonderful Adagio, but often it disappears behind the weight of the strings.  It remained just about audible in this performance, which is important as it will return with added passion on the horns at the movement’s climax. Overall, this was a gloriously warm-hearted performance. Even though the movement is graced by a short funeral march episode, there was never really a moment of gloom, just wave upon wave of serenely beautiful music, music such as moves you to tears of joy rather than despair, played simply and directly, full of character but devoid of idiosyncratic distortion. I may be getting soppy in my old age, but it seemed to fill my heart with love.

The Scherzo. Nicht schnell was in fact taken pretty fast, hugely exciting, the woodwind hauntingly calling out above the bustle, the fortissimo tutti outbursts of arresting incisiveness.  The Trio was magnificently done, wonderfully transparent, the contrasting elements subtly shaded.

Often critical commentary regards the Finale as problematic, and Georg Tintner couldn’t abide the chirpy little motive that forms part of the third theme group. But Katharina Wincor demonstrated very clearly that, as Richard Osborne remarked when reviewing Klemperer’s famous EMI recording, as Confucius said, ‘the way out is through the door.’ She had the score in front of her and she conducted it. The destination seemed always in sight and the direction of the movement never faltered, it progressed with tremendous energy. The slower section of the development was given its due space, and then with the recapitulation the movement set off with increasing energy towards the coda, urgent pizzicatos from the basses, stirring brass fanfares and suddenly the first movement first theme was upon us and the movement closed. What a joy it had been!

Before the Bruckner, the orchestra played a deeply satisfying and alert performance of Brahms Haydn variations.  The textures were always clearly characterized, the balance and articulation well observed. The orchestra sounded really impressive and brought the work’s varied episodes to a resounding conclusion.

This delightful week’s festival, the St Florian Bruckner Days, would now seem to be taking on new life, rejuvenated partly by the recruitment of Wincor, and also by the appointment of Peter Aigner, viola player in the orchestra, as Artistic Director. This year it had begun with a splendid fanfare of trumpets and drums introducing of concert of male voice works by Bruckner and his contemporaries, accompanied with historical brass instruments. Very rarely heard works by Bruckner such as Abendzauber, Germanenzug and Lasst Jubeltöne laut erklingen received excellent performances from Hard-Chor Men and the Schwanthaler-Consort. A Liederabend with Marcus Miesenberger included the bizarre and splendidly composed 12 Mikrolieder nach Gedichten von Ernst Jandl by Matthias Giesen, retiring Artistic Director. As always there is plenty of variety in the events that constitute this festival. August 2026 will see the return of Wincor, where she will be given the Nowak Edition of the second version of Bruckner’s Third Symphony to conduct. I shall be there.

Ken Ward

Featured Image: Conductor Katharina Wincor and the Altomonte Orchestra at St Florian Basilika © Reinhard Winkler