The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

For many years, the Sixth was regarded a the ‘Cinderella’ among Bruckner’s symphonies. The shortest of all his mature symphonies, as well as the least performed and recorded, in the composer’s output it is squeezed between the mighty edifices of the contrapuntally complex Fifth and the monumental but intensely lyrical Seventh (a fate similar to that of Beethoven’s Fourth, perhaps his most underrated symphony). When one thinks of Brucknerian pilgrims paying homage to the master in the secular temple of the concert hall, it is the popular Fourth or Seventh symphonies that come to mind, or the more forbidding structures of the Third, Fifth and Eighth, and also the great torso of the unfinished Ninth, but not the slender, elusive Sixth.

It is not just the Sixth’s modest length (most performances come in at comfortably under an hour) that makes it atypical in Bruckner’s oeuvre. It was composed between 1879 and 1881 at a time of unusual creative confidence; though still smarting from the disastrous premiere of the Third Symphony, Bruckner had recently been appointed lecturer in harmony and counterpoint at Vienna University, just the sort of official recognition by which he set much store. Accordingly, it has none of the problematic textual issues that plague the Third, Fourth and Eighth symphonies, if one discounts the cut and retouched version made by Mahler for the first full performance in February 1899, which has thankfully not gained a foothold in the repertoire. The music’s modal inflections, harmonic twists and turns, circumscribed lyricism and somewhat fitful Finale mean that it is far removed from the ‘cathedrals in sound’ analogy so readily used by Brucknerian commentators. Yet the very features that make the Sixth so elusive are also indicative of its boldness: Bruckner was fond of saying that ‘die Sechste ist die keckste’ – ‘the Sixth is the boldest’ (also translatable as the ‘cheekiest’ or even ‘sauciest’).

Outside of complete cycles of the symphonies, recordings of the Sixth were once pretty rare: Horst Stein and Wolfgang Sawallisch made notable accounts, but Furtwängler’s celebrated wartime performance with the Berlin Philharmonic famously lacks the first movement, though even this grievous loss doesn’t distract from a traversal of blazing intensity and insight. Klemperer’s New Philharmonia recording is still admired by many, but his rather straight-laced, ponderous way with the first movement now feels rather dated. Yet in recent years the Sixth has seen a marked revival in its fortunes, beginning with Roger Norrington’s iconoclastic and thrillingly direct 2007 live recording (about to be reissued in a budget box of all his Stuttgart Bruckner performances) which emphasised the music’s boldness while stripping it of what Norrington viewed as anachronistic string vibrato. Since then, the work’s representation on disc has gone from strength to strength. Even setting aside complete cycles and reissues, since March 2019 there have been four new recordings of the Sixth, from Ticciati (on Linn), Rattle (LSO Live), Jansons (BR Klassik) and Dausgaard (BIS), with another (made in 2012) due imminently from Juanjo Mena and the BBC Philharmonic on Chandos.

How to explain this sudden, remarkable change in fortunes? Perhaps the Sixth’s very atypicality, its deliberate non-expansiveness, makes it appealing to concert programmers, audiences and even conductors for whom time is at a premium? More positively put, the music’s conciseness throws aspects of Bruckner’s style – his extraordinary harmonic boldness, for instance, or his rhythmic layering (at its most daringly complex in the first movement) – into sharper relief. For a vivid illustration of this, try the work’s opening, a finely ‘etched’ dotted-rhythm-plus-triplet, fulfilling the function of (while sounding quite unlike) the more usual Brucknerian tremolo. Then there’s the same movement’s extraordinary coda, where the music ranges in the course of just a few bars over a huge variety of keys (memorably characterised by Tovey as ‘Homeric’) before the final, astonishing plagal cadence.

The Adagio, with its anticipations of Wagner’s Parsifal as well as echoes of Die Meistersinger, and its unique mixture of darkness and light, is in many ways unlike any other Brucknerian slow movement, and its glowing final bars can, in the right hands, be the most touching in all the symphonies. After this, the robust Scherzo (with its shades of the hunt from the Fourth Symphony, and a remarkable refusal to settle on the root position of the tonic chord) is disarmingly direct, while the even briefer Trio includes even stronger hunting allusions, and an enigmatic, self-knowing yet almost casual quotation of the main theme of the Fifth. Could it be that such concentrated directness appeals to the postmodern mindset, to performers and audiences all too familiar with the concept (and feeling) of self-awareness?

The Finale takes the listener if anything a stage further. Though not vastly shorter than the first movement, it established the pattern of a livelier, more compact finale that Bruckner returned to in the Seventh Symphony. Its disrupted continuity is altogether more successfully and imaginatively deployed than in the luckless Third Symphony, while its harmonic twists, fragmentations and triumphant yet curiously abrupt close suggests an ironic undertow (and an open-endedness) that is surprisingly contemporary.