In addition to Bruckner’s nine mature symphonies, there are two others which the composer discarded: one in D minor, designated by Bruckner as his ‘Symphony Number Zero’, which is moderately well known, and an earlier one in F minor, which is scarcely ever played and is referred to sometimes as ‘Symphony Number Double Zero’. The F minor symphony was written merely as an exercise but it is an enjoyable, unpretentious work with more to offer the listener than one might expect from a composition with such an unpromising origin: Bruckner was aged nearly forty and already a fully-qualified, accomplished composer when he produced this work in 1863, so nobody should assume from its alternative title of ‘Study Symphony’ that this is a score which has been dredged up from his early student days.

In the F minor Symphony, Bruckner was testing his own ability to write a conventional, large-scale work, and to achieve this he suppressed his stylistic individuality deliberately, with the result that the character of the music suggests the composer’s predecessors such as Weber and (at the start of the finale) Schumann, more than it suggests Bruckner himself. Its first recording did not appear until 1972, when EMI issued one, long deleted, by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Elyakum Shapirra. To my knowledge, the only other version released since then is that by Eliahu Inbal on Teldec with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Even if more recordings of it were available for comparison, one would probably still find that this modest work allows less scope for subtle variations in interpretation than do the later symphonies, but Ashkenazy’s tempi are so different from Inbal’s that this basic parameter alone is sufficient to account for a significant divergence between the two performances. The most extreme instance of this is in the scherzo, where Ashkenazy is much slower than Inbal in the main section but much faster than him in the trio, the tempo relationships chosen by each conductor being thus the reverse of each other. Ashkenazy’s is considerably the faster of the two recordings in the first movement, imparting an airy mood to the music; one might argue that Inbal’s heavier approach conforms more closely to what we identify nowadays as Bruckner’s characteristic voice, but when one recalls that the composer wrote this symphony with not only no interest in displaying his own individuality but even with the specific intention of eliminating it to some extent, it is clear that to expect any performance consciously to foreshadow Bruckner’s later style is inappropriate, although this does not prevent us from being able to glimpse traces of Bruckner’s later works here in embryo: moreover, Ashkenazy’s choice of tempo is supported by the marking of Allegro molto vivace in the score. Likewise, in the second movement, his quick tempo for the G minor section at 4’04" eschews Inbal’s deliberate ponderousness.

The recording was made in the same Berlin church as that which was used for many of Eugen Jochum’s distinguished Bruckner recordings and the sound quality is good. My only complaint about the production is that after hearing extraneous noises during the first movement exposition, to hear identical noises again at exactly the same points in the score when the opening four minutes of music are repeated gives the game away that the musicians recorded it only once (for instance, compare 2’13" & 2’16" with 6’20" & 6’23"); whilst such recycling is standard procedure in the recording industry, none of us enjoy having our illusions of spontaneity shattered in this way. There are no similar distractions in the finale, whose three-minute exposition is followed by a literal repeat of itself.

Although Inbal’s mid-price version is excellent, I recommend Ashkenazy’s full-price version as the one to buy. Do not attach importance to the price differential, as the Teldec issue has no coupling, whilst the new Ondine release contains a valuable bonus which more than justifies the higher price asked: we are given the 16-minute slow movement of the String Quintet (1878/9), a work of Bruckner’s maturity, in an arrangement for string orchestra by Fritz Oeser, whose credentials as a Bruckner scholar were impeccable (his fine edition of the Third Symphony appeared in 1950). This Adagio has made more impression on me here than in any performance which I have heard of the original chamber version of the quintet: it is too important to be regarded as just a ‘fill-up’ and it is not be to be missed.

Reviewer

Raymond Clarke

Performance

Recording