June 27, 2007
Cleveland's satisfying Bruckner
Earlier this year, the Cleveland Orchestra — our resident Big Orchestra for the next nine seasons at the Carnival Center in Miami — released its first-ever DVD, a performance of the Bruckner Fifth Symphony recorded in September at the Bruckner Festival in Linz, Austria.
Cleveland director Franz Welser-Most, like Bruckner, is a native of Upper Austria, and this music is as close to his heart as any music could be. The DVD was filmed in the stunning Baroque St. Florian church (pictured above) where the composer was a choirboy and organist, and where he was buried after his death in 1896.
(During a conversation in German with Welser-Most that also is on this disc, Bruckner’s beaten-up old Bosendorfer piano can be seen, and so can the large memorial slab under which the composer lies.)
The Fifth, which was completed in the first days of 1878, is a massive, granitic work in B-flat major replete with the organ-like blocks of color, long rests and wide-open spaces typical of the composer’s work, and which sound natural in the echoing of the St. Florian basilica. The Fifth also boasts a beautiful slow movement, a huge but charming scherzo and a heavily contrapuntal finale that ends with a chorale that soars into the heavens.
Anyone who has seen Welser-Most in rehearsal has noted his essential collegiality, his modest and respectful manner, and it seems to translate here into deep affection for the music. This is not a Bruckner of conductor-driven gigantic contrasts; rather, Welser-Most lets the music’s built-in darks and lights speak for themselves, so that the symphony comes across as strong, logical and full of power, not deliberately perverse.
The Cleveland plays this music beautifully, with an intense, committed sound in which the great brass-laden climaxes are awesome but not overwhelming. They are natural, like immense trees, rather than swollen; this is a rational Bruckner, and it’s gratifying to hear it that way.
Some devotees of this composer might prefer an approach of greater drama, but I like this one better: It makes the music seem less like an aberration and more the work of a master craftsman commenting on the facts of his faith and the Romantic musical flowering in which he was living.
Although Bruckner's self-doubt was legendary, the music doesn't sound that way. It's actually tough to think of another composer whose basic musical serenity was so impervious to the tonal turmoil around him while at the same time being so clearly of its period.
In any case, the orchestra sounds marvelous in this music, and Welser-Most has done his countryman well.
Coming in January: Here's a list of the pieces for the three-program series the Cleveland will bring to Knight Hall early next year. Perhaps the most intriguing offering is the suite from the opera Powder Her Face, by the British composer Thomas Ades. Pianist Radu Lupu will play the great D minor Concerto of Mozart (K. 466), and the violinist Midori will play the Tchaikovsky concerto.
