In 1993 the Swiss conductor Mario Venzago gave a performance
of Bruckner’s 3rd Symphony with the now-defunct
Milan RAI SO that impressed me mightily for its intuitive grandeur.
He found the secret of letting the music breathe. So it is splendid
news that he is now setting down a complete Bruckner symphony
cycle.
The records come with lengthy notes explaining that this will
be a Bruckner cycle like no other. I tend to be suspicious of
performances that arrive with a 5-page manifesto attached. If
people can’t hear what the conductor is driving at just
by listening, it’s useless trying to brow-beat them into
believing they’ve heard something they haven’t.
In the present case, however, the performances are so awesomely
magnificent that I did find it of some interest - afterwards
- to read about his intentions. Somewhat puzzlingly, I seem
to have been impressed and moved at times for reasons other
than those for which I am apparently supposed to have been impressed
and moved. On the whole I wish Venzago had just stuck to conducting.
Venzago’s Bruckner is surely here to stay. We will have
time to analyze it in detail at leisure. So let me just list
a few of the things that strike me.
Texture: Venzago’s curriculum reveals that he has
spent a good deal of time unravelling contemporary works of
the post-Nono variety. Maybe it is thanks to this that his textures
have unfailing luminosity and clarity. Every instrument has
its individual colour and voice and they all mingle without
congealing into a generalized mass. Credit also belongs to the
sound engineers - the producer is named as Andreas Werner -
who have ensured that this all reaches us as it should.
Articulation, phrasing and attack: Great care is taken
to give the dance-based sections their proper lilt. Particularly
revelatory is Venzago’s pacing of the secondary material
in the finale of Symphony no. 4. The phrasing suggests the influence
of modern Historically Informed Practice. The first note of
the theme that opens the Seventh Symphony, for example, is given
a long expressive bulge, and then separated from the rising
arpeggio that follows. This may sound dogmatic on paper and
in some hands probably would be so. If it is not so here, I
think this is due to Venzago’s colouring, pacing, and
above all attack. Each Brucknerian period arises from
silence and falls into silence. This means that the way a new
period is attacked is fundamental. It is evident that Venzago
has given a lot of thought to this. A new idea may slide in
hesitantly, as at the beginning of the Fourth Symphony’s
slow movement. Or listen to the depth of timbre as the drone
bass in the trio of the same work’s third movement is
sunk into. The sound is not directly attacked but taken by stealth
and then allowed to swell out, like a human voice. The strongest
sforzatos are never banged out with a straight, hard-hitting
attack. Starting from a rounded attack, the sound is allowed
to well out of the orchestra.
Tempi and tempo relationships: In the past conductors
tended to be rhapsodic with Bruckner, speeding up in crescendos
and slowing down in diminuendos. This was superseded by the
“structural” approach which meant, at its most reductive,
sticking blindly to whatever tempo you set at the beginning
of the movement. If whole sections sound wrong at this tempo,
this passes for “integrity”. It is certainly an
easier approach to manage. A metronome could do it as well as
a human conductor, perhaps better. Venzago analyzes the best
tempo for each Brucknerian period, so that it is duly solemn,
lilting, dancing, trudging or whatever. He does not make hysterical
accelerandos within these periods. The single periods within
a long movement may not always go at exactly the same tempo,
however. The art of bringing this off lies in timing the pauses
between sections and, again, dosing the right attack for the
new section so that it convinces as logically following on from
the previous one.
Silence, space and mountain heights: This is less easy
to analyze and may be only my personal reaction. These performances
all seem to take place at an altitude where the air is clearer,
the vistas longer. In the end it is the music’s silences
that prevail. The art of creating this impression presumably
lies in a combination of the technical features I’ve tried
to describe above. Though I suppose another conductor might
mix the same features in such a way as to create a quite different
effect.
Many years ago a critic in Gramophone - who I shall not name,
though I suppose the review could be hunted down on their site
if you really wanted to - discussed a set of Bruckner’s
Fifth and Sixth Symphonies played by a provincial German orchestra
under a little-known German conductor. The critic had tart words
(I’m quoting from memory but this was the gist) about
ill-equipped bands setting forth in the Brucknerian ocean with
their flimsy little rafts. He noted that the organ sonorities
of the Fifth brought a degree of unanimity missing from the
more complex rhythms of the Sixth. And, in a final lash of the
pen, he commented that the notes were dedicated, not to the
music, but to the “self-effacing genius of Günther
Wand”. A few years later the Wand-wagon was in full swing,
the critic in question one of its most august occupants.
I mention this as a prelude to sticking my neck out equally.
At the risk of making a fool of myself in the opposite sense,
I suggest Venzago’s Bruckner may be for the 2020s as iconic
as Wand’s was for the 1990s.
Christopher Howell
Masterwork Index: Symphony
4 ~~ Symphony
7
Basle Symphony Orchestra/Mario Venzago 
