Anton BRUCKNER (1824-1896)
Symphony in D minor WAB
100 (1869) – “Die Nullte”
Philharmonie Festiva/Gerd Schaller
rec. live, Regentenbau Bad Kissingen, Bayerisches Rundfunk – Studio
Franken, Germany, 2015. DDD
HÄNSSLER PROFIL PH15035 [43:29]
Having completed a highly successful survey of Bruckner’s
nine, numbered symphonies with his live recording of the Sixth in March 2013,
Gerd Schaller has now turned his attention to the fringes of Bruckner’s
output. This new recording from March 2015 of the so-called “Die Nullte”
is a most welcome addition to the discography.
I was unfamiliar with this symphony but reassured by my instant recognition
of some very Brucknerian tropes in the opening bars which heralded a surprisingly
mature and rewarding work; perhaps it is for this reason that although he
initially disowned it, Bruckner apparently tacitly acknowledged its worth
by eventually bequeathing the manuscript to the Linz state museum. The opening
motif is a persistent, scurrying, semiquaver figure over a sombre march and
punctuated by stately, defiant brass chords, all very proleptic of the beginning
of the Third Symphony. Ultimately a magnificent climax is underlined by a
characteristic Brucknerian pause of six beats and we thus remain on familiar
territory.
The calm, richly harmonised introduction to the Andante creates a bucolic
or pastoral atmosphere, followed by a first falling, then rising, chromatic
theme which is passed around the orchestra from the cellos to the woodwind
to the flute to the strings. The Scherzo is typically rumbustious and faintly
menacing; the Finale is grand but slightly stilted and disjointed; perhaps
the least successful movement. Indeed the comparatively short measure of the
symphony’s movements – at least by Bruckner’s later standards
– may perhaps partially be explained by his inability or unwillingness
at this stage of his symphonic career to trust the material to longer development.
For all its grandeur, it does not aspire to the cosmic “heavenly length”
of the Fifth or the Eighth.
Nonetheless, this is a thoroughly enjoyable work, superbly played by an orchestra
which set the highest standards in its Bruckner cycle and in the same warm,
spacious, first-rate sound we have come to expect. It's another live
recording in the more accommodating venue of the Regentenbau and without the
challenge of the reverberation attendant upon the recording of those symphonies
performed in Ebrach Abbey.
Ralph Moore
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