The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

Anton Bruckner, the bicentenary of whose birth falls this week, wrote music of extremes: blazing orchestral tuttis and sparsely-textured woodwind solos, extended lyrical outpourings and fragmented thematic cells punctuated by pauses. In its turn, this music seems to prompt either fanatical devotion or downright incomprehension (as it did during Bruckner’s lifetime), all of which – combined with the sheer scale and duration of the symphonies that form the bulk of his output – can make it seem rather forbidding to the uninitiated. There are other factors that can be off-putting, too: the multiple versions and editions of many of Bruckner’s symphonies (he was an inveterate reviser, often at the behest of well-meaning but misguided acolytes), the intensely religious nature of the man himself and the quasi-religious fervour of many of his admirers, and the posthumous appropriation of his music by the Nazi regime in the 1930s and 40s.

Little wonder, then, that for many listeners the way into Bruckner’s music is through the more compact and immediately appealing (though no less characterful) world of his choral motets: epigrammatic by comparison with the symphonies and masses, yet still encompassing a vast expressive and dynamic range (as in the ever-popular Locus iste and Christus factus est for unaccompanied choir). For others, his slender chamber music output (not least the F major String Quintet with its glorious Adagio slow movement) has – for all its symphonic breadth – an intimate charm which is far more beguiling than the monumentality of the symphonies.

Yet inevitably it is the symphonies – the genre which occupied the composer almost exclusively for the last three decades of his life – that attract the most attention. Among the issues that might discourage newcomers to Bruckner’s music is the fact that in addition to the nine numbered symphonies (with the Ninth surviving as a three-movement, its finale left incomplete at the composer’s death) there are a further two, in D minor (‘No.0’, dating between the official First and Second symphonies), and the early ‘Study’ Symphony in F minor (sometimes labelled ‘No.00’). Furthermore, no fewer than five of the symphonies (Nos. 1–4 and No.8) exist in multiple versions; and, among the even more numerous published editions that have appeared from Bruckner’s lifetime onwards, some are blatant travesties while others indulge in a ‘mix and match’ of various versions. (The most famous example is the Robert Haas edition of No.8, which grafts onto Bruckner’s revised version of 1890 passages from the earlier 1887 version, creating a hybrid that is still favoured by several eminent Brucknerians.)

The potential confusion arising from these factors led Deryck Cooke in 1969 to publish a famous article optimistically titled ‘The Bruckner Problem Simplified’ and for many decades the general thrust of Cooke’s argument divided Brucknerians between the editions of Robert Haas (general editor of the International Bruckner Society edition until 1945) and those of his successor (and gatekeeper for many decades of the Bruckner archives in Vienna) Leopold Nowak. If anything, since the 1990s the situation has become yet more complex (although Brucknerians might prefer the term ‘nuanced’), as further editorial refinements and in-between versions have been prepared by editors including the late William Carragan and Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, as well as Benjamin Korstvedt and Paul Hawkshaw. At the same time there has been an element of revisionism from some who have embraced long-discredited editions like the heavily-cut and rescored edition of the Fifth Symphony by Franz Schalk (once favoured by Hans Knappertsbusch but few others).

Amid this veritable avalanche of musicological detail, the blazing originality of Bruckner’s creations can sometimes be overlooked: the astonishingly ambitious musical architecture, the bold harmonic and textural juxtapositions, the fruitful interplay of often lively foreground figuration and patiently-paced underlying pulse. Some of the original versions (of the Third and Fourth symphonies, for example) may feel lacking in focus compared with the relative clarity of the tauter revisions, but equally the latter may feel for some listeners to be lacking in freshness or too-brutally pruned (a common criticism levelled at the third version of No.3).

For the neophyte, the time-honoured safe entry points have been the ardently lyrical Seventh Symphony (which, thankfully, exists in essentially just one authentic version) and the scarcely less appealing No.4 (the ‘Romantic’) with its wonderfully evocative horns calls and ‘hunting’ Scherzo. But there is no one-size-fits all recommendation: my own way into Bruckner’s soundworld came via the austere magnificence of the contrapuntally intricate Fifth Symphony and the edge-of-the-beyond Ninth, closely followed by the compelling imperfections of the Third.

Probably the most important recommendation in this bicentennial year is to programmers and record companies: a plea for greater clarity in identifying which version and which edition is being used for a particular performance. This information is helpful not just for the cognoscenti, but also for those newcomers trying to negotiate their way around Bruckner’s multi-faceted, potentially life-transforming output. Pity the poor soul who has fallen in love with a particular symphony in one version, only to discover (as can easily happen with the Third, Fourth and Eighth) that the recording they have subsequently purchased contains often radically different music!

To their aid has come the newly collected ‘Complete Versions Edition’ recently completed on the Capriccio label under conductor Markus Poschner, and due for imminent release as a box set on Naxos. While the reviews of the individual releases have ranged from enthusiastic to mixed, the opportunity to have all the main versions of each symphony collected together is too good to miss. Meanwhile, the impecunious might explore the Suisse Romande cycle recently reissued by Brilliant Classics under the assured direction of Marek Janowski. In individual symphonies, the options range from the downright iconoclastic (Mario Venzago on CPO), via the briskly-paced Norrington (SWR Classic) to the controversially long-winded (Sergiu Celibidache on Warner). Seasoned Brucknerians still sing the praises of Furtwängler, Klemperer, Böhm, Karajan and Giulini (the latter’s traversal of the Ninth with the Vienna Philharmonic on DG remains a thing of wonder).