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SEEN AND HEARD CONCERT REVIEW

 

Duddell, Schubert and Bruckner: London Symphony Orchestra; Sir Colin Davis (conductor). Barbican Hall, London 1.6.2008 (JPr)


Like London bendy buses when one Schubert ‘Unfinished’ Symphony No.8 comes along another is sure to follow. The more I hear it though,  the only thing really ‘unfinished’ about it is the name it has been given. Or so it seems to me.

Schubert was only 25 when he composed the music in October 1822 and he wrote  a great deal more in his remaining six years. Sketches exist for a scherzo for this Symphony in B minor, and he even scored a few bars of it, but no sketches for a finale have come to light. During 1823 he gave the score to his friend Anselm Hüttenbrunner for him to pass on to the Styrian Music Society in Graz in thanks for his having been elected an honorary member. Remarkably Hüttenbrenner hung on to it and some 37 years after the Schubert’s death it resurfaced in 1865 and was given a belated première in Vienna almost immediately. Why Schubert let this project drop has been a matter of much conjecture ever since. The two movements we have are on a larger scale than anything he had attempted before in a symphony and one theory is that he probably thought there was little chance of getting such a work performed, so he just left it. Once the Symphony was rediscovered and performed though, it quickly established itself as one of the most popular works of the symphonic repertoire even in its truncated state.

The London Symphony Orchestra’s playing was immaculate for their much-admired octogenarian conductor and president Sir Colin Davis, who was remarkably vigorous on the podium when he needed to be during the evening. Eschewing Christoph von Eschenbach’s analytical approach to the work as recently at heard at the Royal Festival Hall,  Davis luxuriated in the sheer beauty of the  sound:  he presented each detail as a miniature wonder of its own, particularly in the precise degree of accentuation required to express a note's place in the shape of a phrase and in ensuring that the woodwind solos were blended with great sensitivity. The bass opening was a sort of subterranean rumble that might even have inspired Wagner for the start of Das Rheingold. The emotional centre of Colin Davis’s performance came in the second movement however,  when the music from the strings sounded like an apotheosis. To begin with it was all very light and Mendelssohnian,  only for the feel-good factor to be cut off by Schubert’s ominous brass heavy chords. In the E major second movement there is almost Ländler-like passage which that I can only describe as if danced in jackboots. There is a pastoral element too,  introduced by clarinet and flute, in which the faltering steps of the opening return only to have  those chords put an end to all that has preceded and lead to the quiet pedal note ending. Yet there has been no resolution,  and no peace of mind achieved.

The musical establishment in Vienna in the late nineteenth century was decidedly pro-Brahms and did not embrace Bruckner eagerly because of his open admiration for Brahms’s rival Richard Wagner. In  the wake of the fiasco of the first performance of his Third Symphony,  Bruckner set to work on his Sixth. He would never live to hear it in its entirety and only the second and third movements were performed in 1883. It is unlikely however that the symphony would have been any better received in Vienna than the Third.

In the Sixth's first movement,  textures swing from the most delicate to  moments of episodic grandeur. Until the horns call out,  this is almost mellow chamber-like Bruckner; the composer’s development of his material recalls Wagner yet the chorale theme that is repeated and the huge climaxes are certainly pure Bruckner. The  Adagio is entirely different as it has an elegiac opening and continues very poignantly. In 1899 Gustav Mahler conducted the symphony’s first complete performance and seems to have been inspired by the descending three notes that are clearly ‘Lebewohl’ from Beethoven and Mahler’s later Ninth Symphony – has this been spotted before? In contrast the Scherzo has violent outbursts and the theme in the tramping bass line reappears in Mahler’s own sixth about four years after he first conducted the Bruckner. The central Trio features horn calls redolent of hunting sounds in a pastoral idyll and in fact we are back in the Mendelssohnian sound world that began the early Schubert in this concert. The finale, like the opening movement, has themes of a disparate character; there is Romantic heroism, lilting and dance-like music, a chorale, a march. Clearly here we have the music of Tristan und Isolde and a musical quotation from the Liebestod ‘Wonne klagend, Alles sagend’ is there more than once. At the end, the theme heard in the opening moments of the first movement returns in a major-mode variant serving to close the symphony on a storming brass-led (and Wagnerian) note of triumph.

If there are any literary agents out there who still  believe in classical music books,  I have my proposal for ‘An Unholy Trinity – Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler’. Without Wagner it is unlikely the other two composers would have a legacy and yet all three are more musically intertwined than any musicologist would seemingly wish to explain to an audience without degrees in music. Their lives (a cross-dresser, a religious ascetic and a hypochondriac) have to be read to be believed. In Stephen Johnson’s learned programme note on the Bruckner symphony there was no relevant comment about Wagner however and only a passing reference to Mahler.

Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony deserves to be more popular and better understood. It begins brightly almost optimistically and if matters do become a little more sombre it all ends affirmatively and this was wonderful realised under Colin Davis. He mostly maintained rhythmic propulsion throughout the four movements and I can forgive the tempo sagging just a little in the Adagio because even then this movement sounded particularly luscious in the strings. The orchestra was superb throughout, and all the brass and horns were remarkable for delivering beautifully burnished sounds throughout an eloquently crafted performance. In his usual unassuming way Sir Colin Davis accepted the warm applause from the entire orchestra and packed hall.

Preceeding these two masterpieces was a short (barely 7 minutes long) première from the ‘UBS Soundscapes: Pioneers’ scheme, which gives UK-based composers, the opportunity to write for a symphony orchestra. Here it was Joe Duddell whose Azalea Fragments (after Patrick Heron) - a piece inspired by one of Heron’s paintings – had also been performed by  the LSO. The full orchestra was employed (apart from the timpani) but the work seemed like  fairly derivative fare with a haunting refrain and prominent chimes of a bell. There was a peroration in the brass similar to what we would later hear from Bruckner and with contributions from celesta and strings,  life seemed to be ebbing gently away. The committed conductor for this item was Pavel Kotla.

Jim Pritchard


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