Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Symphony No. 7 in E major (WAB 107) (ed. Haas)
Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra/Tatsuya Shimono
rec. live, 27 May 2022, HBG Hall, Hiroshima Bunka Gabuen University, Hiroshima
BRAIN MUSIC OSBR39005 [64]
I had great expectations of this issue as I have previously recommended recordings from Brain Music of live performances of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies (review review) from the same team and these featured in my Records of the Year 2021 and 2020 respectively.
I was not disappointed; straight away, this recording conveys a real sense of the immediacy and impact of a live performance. Timings are conventional – very similar to Karajan’s, in fact – but there is nothing routine about the execution of the music and the superb sound readily conveys the raw muscularity of the playing here; it is really confident and expansive, exuding a proper sense of purpose, being flexible, agogic but never wilful. The conducting is unobtrusive but wholly in service of the music; the first climax five minutes in hits hard after a flawlessly paced cumulative motion and although it might be heresy to proclaim it, the experience of playing this straight after listening to Christian Thielemann’s new Fifth Symphony with the VPO was salutary; the Hirsoshima Symphony Orchestra might supposedly be a second-tier band, but everything about Shimono’s galvanisation of their performance puts the supposedly more illustrious of Viennese combination in the shade. There is a bite, impact and virility about their playing which is infectious; they know how to invoke the requisite, epic, Brucknerian quality but are also capable of subtle dynamic variation and delicacy. Especially noteworthy is the melodiousness of their woodwinds; if I have one criticism of the first movement, it is that the conclusion is very slightly perfunctory and needs more emphasis of the kind Karajan applies.
Indeed, this is not perhaps a perfect account; the tempo at the opening of the Adagio is rather too fast and insufficiently spacious; it requires a tad more flexibility to avoid the intensity starting to wane after that emphatic opening - but there is such a ferocious attack to the playing after that, that the movement comes off as both dignified and propulsive. Highlights include a wonderful trombone entry at 18:42 and mesmerising horn playing until the end.
The Scherzo is energised and demonic, featuring excellent timpani. As with the Adagio, for me, the finale starts just a little too hastily and that celerity continues into the pizzicato section, the lower strings sounding too perky to be sufficiently imposing. I concede that these are matters of personal interpretative taste and the big brass chorale certainly reimposes the necessary gravitas - but unfortunately Shimono then rushes his fences again, as if racing to the finish. His brass section makes an extraordinarily deep, dense sound – but undue haste is the enemy of the greatest Bruckner, where, to borrow a cliché, patience is a virtue. Nonetheless, a final, welcome relaxation in tempo allows for the breadth, space and grandeur of a truly epic conclusion and I cannot complain that Shimono exhibits any inconsistency in his approach to this symphony; it is all of a piece and its sustained propulsiveness certainly makes it mark within the aesthetic criteria he so clearly embraces and promulgates through his conducting.
Ralph Moore
This review commissioned by, and reproduced here by kind permission of, The Bruckner Journal.
Published: November 4, 2022
