Anton BRUCKNER (1824-1896)
Symphony No. 7 in E major WAB 107 (1885 version; ed. Haas)
Der Ring Tokyo Orchestra/Yoshinori Nishiwaki
rec. live, 4 & 5 September 2019, Tokyo Opera City Concert Hall
FINE NF NF65809 SACD [63:51]
How far from what you hear can you tell how an orchestra is seated in a recording? A good – even perhaps average – pair of ears should be able to tell whether violins are divided antiphonally, if double-basses are right or left or lined up across the back. But what if an orchestra is playing seated and there are no risers – or, if they are playing standing?
Baroque music is frequently played today by a few orchestras who stand – the most celebrated being the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra and the Aurora Orchestra. Japan, once behind the curve than many other countries, has in this new recording of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony appeared to have gone to the front of it and in doing so bent it in a direction which, at the time it was recorded, other orchestras would have been unlikely to have chosen to follow in performances of the Bruckner symphonies. Well into COVID 2020, however, this Bruckner Seventh offers a template for playing the great Romantic symphonies in a different way.
There are some things about this performance which have a commonality with historical Bruckner recordings by Herregewhe and Norrington and in other ways it quite eschews them. Flexibility of orchestral sound is one of the common touches, so much so that this performance can sometimes sound a little bit lean; however, it is also unquestionably a little more muscular than either Herregewhe or Norrington. It is applied with a much thicker brush. Yoshinori Nishiwaki, the conductor of this Bruckner Seventh, is altogether more spacious, too, especially when compared with the inflexibly fast Norrington who rattles through his performance like an out of control drill. The one difference here, however, is that the sound of the Der Ring Tokyo Orchestra does not identify as particularly historical; there is certainly none of the stripped back string sound, minus vibrato, nor acidic brass, you get from a Norrington recording. What it is not, however, is maximalist Bruckner – that is, Bruckner as scored by the composer for that huge orchestra you may expect.
Der Ring Tokyo Orchestra does not approach all the symphonies it plays in the same way. If I recall, their recording of Bruckner’s Third had the players seated throughout its duration – and the orchestra played in a semi-circle; not quite conventional, but close enough to the common standard. This Seventh experiments with Brucknerian sound in quite abstract ways. Composed of what is approximately eight string quartets, with four double basses, the orchestra is more like a trapezoid for this recording relying on a balance of sound which is highly symmetrical. In a sense, this is an unusual layout for what is Bruckner’s most asymmetrical symphony but for the numerically obsessive Bruckner this might have been an appealing layout, too. Listen to the recording, however, and I don’t think this sounds significantly different than a standard antiphonal performance. I can’t in all honesty say either that I get the impression for much of the time that the players stand throughout; there is no pushing forward of the music. If anything, balances are sometimes askew. I have heard Bruckner symphonies this year where the reduced number of double basses successfully works in scale with the rest of the orchestra; what I have not heard, as we get here, is them split into pairs antiphonally. I can tell you it does not work.
In these socially distanced times, this does sound like a performance where space is part of the interpretation. Often this works in quite beautiful ways; sometimes it goes for nothing. In the first movement, for example, at around 8:30 where in many Japanese orchestras you’d expect to hear such a bottom-up string sound you don’t really experience it here. In the Adagio I think the thinness in the lower strings has almost nothing to do with either the acoustic of the hall or the arrangement of the orchestra; rather, it’s a deliberate attempt by Nishiwaki to conduct the music this way and he certainly wouldn’t be the first to do so.
But it’s rather telling how that space also works. The coda of the first movement is a case in point. The opening theme on the cellos is rather wider in its impact than one usually hears almost as if the arc is expected to focus on them and not elsewhere. But this would be the case when you realise that the cellos are strung out across the front of the orchestra and not placed within it. But what is a revelation here is not so much a revelation in the Adagio.
I tend to diverge from the previous review of this disc on Musicweb. I don’t disagree with RMo’s basic contention that some Japanese Bruckner performances can be too restrained and respectful because they very often are and there is some of both in this recording. The Nishiwaki Seventh is not really a case of comparing apples with apples, however. If you like your Bruckner to sound like Giulini or Karajan, let alone have the crushing weight of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Sir Colin Davis, which you can hear in his May 1984 Seventh from Tokyo (where he places the Adagio in the correct order), then Nishiwaki will not appeal to your palate one iota. But Nishiwaki neither means, nor aims, to give us a Bruckner Seventh along the same lines as those conductors in this performance. I don’t quite hear some of the missteps here as RM does as a weakness in Nishiwaki’s conducting; rather, I hear it as part of an interpretation which approaches this symphony in less monumental terms. It is a much less fussy, more austere, kind of Bruckner. I enjoyed it rather more than I imagined I would.
I have no issues with the sound on the disc; it’s very good. But this is a performance that will be of most interest for the relative uniqueness in how it is performed rather than the merits, or otherwise, of what the conductor and orchestra do with Bruckner’s score.
Marc Bridle
Previous review: Ralph Moore
