Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Symphony No 9 in D minor, WAB 109 (Edit. Nowak)
Tokyo Symphony Orchestra/Takashi Asahina
rec. 16 March 1991, Orchard Hall, Tokyo
ST LAURENT STUDIO YSL1246T [60]
Along with Sergiu Celibidache, Takashi Asahina was one of the most prolific Bruckner conductors of the twentieth century. Neither was a creature of the recording studio, which partly accounts for their large number of recordings, but they both also benefitted from an exceptionally rich and opportune broadcasting tradition which made it possible for such recordings to exist in the first place. Not everything both conductors performed was worthy of preserving; much of it was, however.
Asahina very much came from that tradition of conductors that included Mravinsky and Szell – and even Celibidache; conductors who stamped their own identity and sound on the orchestras they conducted over decades. Asahina would conduct the Osaka Philharmonic for almost half a century – although I think he was less authoritarian than these conductors, and much less interested in the perfection of performances than these men as well.
Takashi Asahina has often been compared with Wilhelm Furtwängler – indeed,
he recorded his Symphony No 2 – but it is not a particularly good comparison. They had virtually nothing in common. Although Asahina had conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in 1956, having met Furtwängler earlier in the decade, his period in Germany, which would last for almost ten years, although he would visit until the 1990s, would be spent in Hamburg. No Bruckner seems to have survived on disc from that period – although we can perhaps guess what it might have sounded like from his Beethoven which even then was conceived on a huge scale. Even when he returned in the 1990s Bruckner doesn’t seem to have been on his programs – but another great work with which he is indelibly associated did. His superb Strauss Eine Alpensinfonie, with the NDR Symphony Orchestra – issued on EMI – along with several other recordings of this work made in Japan, show a conductor working on the most monumental of scales.
When I wrote an essay for the Bruckner Journal in 2016, Bruckner’s Late Symphonies in Post-War Japan, I came to both a revised opinion of both Asahina’s Bruckner and a different conclusion about his major performances of the Bruckner Ninth – one of which was this one with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra from 1991. For many years, I had largely been uncritical of Asahina’s Bruckner and I certainly didn’t always test the view that some of his recordings did not measure up to what I was always listening to. I began to address this perception of his work in 2016. Whatever that re-evaluation, however, one thing that remains the same about Asahina is that his performances of the Bruckner symphonies are entirely unpredictable; they often are transparently very different in almost every possible way. This unpredictability was very common with other Asahina performances. His two recordings of Mahler’s Ninth are among the most extreme ever made by a single conductor; his final Osaka Eine Alpensinfonie has almost nothing to do with the Alps; it’s more Himalayan so vast is both the sheer weight of the orchestra and the breadth of the tempo. But it remains one of my go-to performances of this work just because it is so extraordinary and entirely different from almost any other. Like Carlos Kleiber and Sergiu Celibidache he would conduct Ein Heldenleben just a handful of times – but it ended up being a great one – the impact of the battle, once heard, will never leave you in this recording.
Of his roughly eight recordings of the Bruckner Ninth there is one that stands out as unique – the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Ninth from 1996. It’s a controversial, difficult performance. Visionary perhaps, but it’s also shaky and impenetrable and in the end a titanic struggle, especially for the Chicago players who Asahina really did test. It’s unusually implacable, almost immovable, the tempo so fixed in a single direction that it can be challenging for the listener to get through. But this approach is by no means unique to the Chicago Bruckner Ninth.
The others were made in Osaka or mostly – and this would be unusual – Tokyo; the earliest comes from 1976 and the latest 2001. In my Bruckner Journal article when I came down to preferring a single recording of the Ninth I chose the 1995 Osaka recording: largely, Asahina chooses tempi which are grounded perfectly, the playing is exquisitely poised and everything just seems in place. The stars, if you like, aligned on that particular afternoon.
His two Tokyo Symphony Orchestra Ninths are quite different. Performed in 1991 and 1996, the timings are useful because they give a sense of this conductor’s unpredictability. In fact, they represent his fastest and slowest Ninths.
16/3/1991 59:30 25:34 11:08 22:48
13/4/1996 66:28 28:01 11:52 26:15
Asahina was not a conductor who always got slower with age. His 1980 Ninth came in at 66 minutes, for example. In 2001 he would take just under 62 minutes, which is his second quickest performance of a Bruckner Ninth. This happens in his other Bruckner, too. Asahina’s famous St Florian Bruckner Seventh from 1976 is very slow, at just over 71 minutes. However, the same year he made this Tokyo Bruckner Ninth (remember this is his fastest) he recorded the Bruckner Seventh with the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra and the performance would clock in at 74 minutes, including an Adagio of 27 minutes. He would never come close to this tempo again; indeed, his last Bruckner Sevenths, in 2001, barely hit 64 minutes.
There is, I think, something unusual about a Bruckner conductor who in the same year conducts both his fastest and slowest performances of two late Bruckner symphonies. Most conductors are more consistent – and perhaps more boring.
Time only tells us so much about a performance. Some of Asahina’s certainly get stuck in a time warp – his Beethoven is notorious for this; Asahina’s Beethoven can sometimes be as effective as zopiclone. Others, however, can be wonderfully fluid – his Richard Strauss is, without exception, even when he is being downright controversial. His Tchaikovsky, even when slow, is magnificently Russian. I don’t think his Bruckner has ever really suffered from these problems so the substance of his performances rarely has to do with them getting stuck because of the conductor’s inability to handle his tempo choices. The majority of listeners are never going to have a problem with focusing on an Asahina Bruckner symphony – especially a Bruckner Ninth.
For this performance, on the Canadian label St. Laurent Studio (YSL), I used as a comparison the Pony Canyon Classics CD [PCCL-00520] which coupled the Ninth with Bruckner’s Te Deum which was the work played in the first half of the concert (and this is, indeed, how the CDs were released with the Ninth on CD2). It’s unusual programming, because the Te Deum has sometimes been used as the ‘fourth’ movement to Bruckner’s Ninth. It’s a little frustrating the performance isn’t included here; either YSL didn’t have access to a copy or (unlikely) weren’t aware it was included in the concert.
There is a difference in the sound between the YSL and Canyon discs that you are left asking yourself – which is a better representation of the Asahina sound?
YSL are not the most transparent of labels when it comes to identifying their source material and that is the case here – although, mention on the back cover “in collaboration with Henry Fogel” might suggest that a different source to the Canyon one has been used. It was Fogel who brought Asahina to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to conduct the famous Bruckner Fifth (subsequently released on DVD) and later in the season the Bruckner Ninth; Fogel has also been one of the leading authorities on Asahina recordings for many years. Different sources may well be possible since Vol. 1 of this new Asahina Edition – which coupled the two Brahms piano concertos, again given in a single concert, with the great Japanese pianist Takahiro Sonoda – did appear to use different ones to another radio broadcast in my collection.
Asahina was not a subtle conductor in my view. Nor did he always have a very strong sense of string tone, unlike, for example, Hiroshi Wakasugi. This Bruckner Ninth is classic Asahina in the way he handles the strings and the brass although the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra both sounds and plays better than the Osaka Philharmonic did for their conductor. The opening of the Adagio, for example, I find to be rather aggressive – and the repeat of it is just the same. You always get that bottom-up sound with Asahina – a given commonality he had with Furtwängler – but unlike him Asahina’s richness of sound often tends to stop in the middle of the orchestra. Upper strings can really come across as pinched and sharp. This hard as steel coldness doesn’t always suit Bruckner. Canyon gives the orchestra more bloom – my general impression of YSL recordings is that they are drier, less markedly fussy about intervening too much into the processing of sound.
This is immediately apparent at the opening of the first movement. Asahina pushes his horns (who play superbly) to produce a very rounded noble sound – they’re much as Bruckner intended them to be, shrouded in mystery. This is beautifully captured on the Canyon recording – YSL have given it a slightly less glowing recording which takes much of the shine off the horns. Strings at the height of the violin’s ascent also have less depth although this does little to undermine the wonderful arc that Asahina has set for the first movement’s opening five or so minutes – in practice, if not in notated language, a vast crescendo. That consistency of pace can be heard from 7’49 through to 10’57 (right up to the horn and flute) – it is almost like a repeated chant but the tension is flawlessly held even as the music moves between peaks and troughs. From 14’30 Asahina begins the build-up to what is essentially an immense repeat of the opening climax although the way he deals with Bruckner’s vast crests is only of variable tension. The first (approx 15’30) is rather heavy on the rubato at its exit, and there are more trenchant entrances into the following one although as always with Japanese orchestras the timpani are thrillingly rotund and powerful – though how much better it sounds on the old Canyon recording. The Tokyo horns have minor intonation issues coming into the coda but this is Asahina at his finest.
Until the Grand Slam recording of Furtwängler’s Bruckner’s Ninth came to light – which I reviewed in April 2022 – that conductor’s coda to the Ninth had always been like a great masterpiece in need of having several layers of varnish removed. Now that it has, the colossal weight and terror of this cataclysmic cavern of horror is properly articulated in the Furtwängler performance and no other quite comes close to it. Asahina lacks what Furtwängler is so careful at doing and that is ratcheting up tension to a masterly degree. Asahina’s Tokyo brass, especially his horns, lack just that extra ounce of hollow blackness – a Cimmerian darkness. His tempi, too, are, I think, fractionally too fast; here we have a case of stormy terror coming from the sepulchral slowness of the music rather than the quicker pace of it.
Asahina is much more fluid in the Tokyo Scherzo than he would be in Chicago, though with that fluidity comes tremendous heaviness. And this is, I think, the problem with it. Bruckner was extraordinarily original in this movement writing something that wasn’t just openly dissonant but also complex in its monothematic structure. Asahina is the opposite of Furtwängler – who embraces the dissonant side of the music – but he also takes a highly unmeasured (and inverted) approach to its tempo. One struggles with Asahina to find any deviation throughout the Scherzo – is there even a Trio here, one asks, because the tempo doesn’t really change to suggest it is. Furtwängler’s Trio is absolutely there, misguided as it is.
The much brighter sound on the YSL source, as opposed to the wider more atmospheric one on Canyon gives us two quite different points of reference for this Tokyo Bruckner Ninth when it comes to the Adagio. But it’s the tempo that distinguishes the quality – or otherwise – of this performance. The recent Tadaaki Otaka Bruckner Ninth on Fontec, with Asahina’s old orchestra, the Osaka Philharmonic, took a similarly leisurely view of the Adagio – 23 minutes. Otaka, however, actually sounds very fast (and the playing is just brutal); Asahina does not. On the other hand, Kenshiro Sakairi in a magnificent recording with the Tokyo Juventus Orchestra on Altus takes 27 minutes but they sound wonderfully fluid because he carefully judges which sections to take slowly and which to take at a more relaxed speed. This is pretty much the Furtwängler approach.
If we accept that the Adagio is trying to free us from the shackles of the first two movements then performances of it need to reflect on the horrors and despair that precede it. Just as dissonance is Bruckner’s opening language for the Scherzo, so a yelping cry of desperation and anguish is the language of the opening of the Adagio. Asahina hasn’t always seen this opening through the same lens – his Chicago performance is almost atonal so shocking is the crescendo he gives to the trombones and horns at its opening (Giulini could, rather surprisingly, sound like this too). He’s considerably more restrained in Tokyo – although the YSL mastering hints at a slightly less restrained one than Canyon does.
The Adagio is as much about contrast – between darkness and light, agony and serenity, wrath and harmony, on its way towards a kind of resolution – as it is about a search for tonality, and the battle between the major and the minor which is so nakedly exposed in this movement. Asahina doesn’t – in this performance, as he does in Osaka in ‘95 – have the immensity of tempo that the Adagio sometimes requires to take the listener with him (although his build-up to the Adagio’s climax from 16’25 is considerably more powerful than Otaka’s – and the unmatched Furtwängler’s climax starts at 18’13). Those rising horns and tubas, the ascending string scales have too much pace, however, just as the enormity of it is understated. Again, return to Furtwängler or Sakairi for a more profound interpretation.
Asahina Bruckner recordings, which amount to almost eighty-five known performances of the symphonies, of which there were three complete cycles and two partial ones, are by no means all available and those that are have largely been released in editions on SACD by Tower Records in Japan and are difficult to obtain. Some of the Canyon Bruckner recordings were later issued on Exton and you may be lucky to find downloads of these (on Amazon, Presto, Qobuz, Apple Music), or second-hand CD copies. The YSL Asahina series fills an important gap, not least in making his recordings more widely and more cheaply accessible. Unless you already have Canyon copies of Asahina’s recordings to make a comparison with you are unlikely to be able to make a judgment on the quality of YSL’s transfer or mastering. In the case of this Tokyo Bruckner Ninth it is close to the Canyon issue but not superior to it. This recording is available from St. Laurent Studio as either a CD or as a discounted download (which you have to specifically request).
Marc Bridle
Published: October 18, 2022
