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Thursday, May 5, 2005
ASO in Bruckner Sym. No. 8
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org.
Before launching into the monumental warmth of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 8, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra took the unusual step of dimming the lights in Symphony Hall and projecting a few quotes to help set the mood.
Poetic lines by T.S. Eliot remained discreetly on screen throughout the performance: “…the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”
It was a simple but thoughtful theatrical device necessary because Bruckner, puzzingly, is seen by some folks as a “difficult” composer. (And these people stayed away in hoards for the Thursday performance; only 688 people were in attendance in the 1750-seat hall.)
They missed conductor Donald Runnicles’ compelling, often deeply moving interpretation. Although Thursday’s show wasn’t fully cooked, the Eighth is clearly a specialty piece for the ASO’s principal guest conductor. He never confused ponderousness with profundity, instead letting the symphony expand at what felt like a comfortable and natural pace, building it up phrase by phrase, movement by movement.
He made the ASO sound like an Old World orchestra, plush and weighty. The strings sang with a creamy tone. The horns and brass — including four Wagner tubas — delivered their parts with lightness and strength. (Bruckner fans will need to know that the conductor selected the Nowak edition of the symphony; suffice it to say that Bruckner had a lot of editorial problems, and that most of his big works come in slightly different versions.)
In performance, a few loose ends in the orchestra’s coordination and polish reinforced the larger message: this isn’t music of trivial concerns —like getting every single note in its place — but of spiritual power.
Although Bruckner was a devout and meek Austrian Catholic, his music portrays a universe with a remote, unknowable God. We marvel at His works, always seen from a vast distance, like standing at the foot of a mountain. Unlike two other great symphonists, Mahler and Sibelius, Bruckner never prowls around in the forest. His Eighth Symphony, among the composer’s most “personal” works, still sounds free of human foibles.
And more than most conductors, the late Romanticism-loving Runnicles convincingly feels at one with Bruckner’s style of glacial giganticism. The music is often static at a snapshot, but over time you sense slow and implacable movement.
In music by, say, Mozart, you get a payoff every few measures; in Bruckner, the shivers of satisfaction are great, but they’re stretched one per movement, or really one per symphony. It’s a b-i-g payoff, but you have to be patient.
This is part of what gives the Eighth an aura of the epic natural world, which Runnicles’ blessedly exploited to its fullest. Occasional birdy twitters from the woodwinds, or massive granite facades from the strings, led to uncanny impressions of observing the evolution of Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands, or the sheer cliffs and imposing light depicted in Albert Bierstadt paintings — all compressed into 80 minutes of music.
In the Adagio, Runnicles showed perfect mastery of the long form, never allowing the tension to slacken, never releasing his grip. The finale moved as a light-footed march, hair-raising at times but missing a sense of an inevitable conclusion, of T.S. Eliot’s enlightened circularity.
Still, almost everything was in place Thursday. With detail from the orchestra cleaned up, audiences for subsequent performances should enjoy an overwhelming experience.
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