Bruckner on period instruments? It’s not unknown – Roger Norrington and Philippe Herreweghe did pioneering work – but it’s still pretty rare, particularly on record. The latest example comes from Anima Eterna and Pablo Heras-Casado, who have recorded the Fourth Symphony, the first of a projected cycle for Harmonia Mundi. The Spanish conductor came to Bruckner quite late. Why did he wait?

‘Even though I’ve always had a broad appetite for music,’ he begins, ‘mixing styles and different composers and periods, Bruckner was not something that got under my skin. Wagner also took me a while: with Wagner it was the right time to start, with Der fliegende Holländer in Madrid in 2016. With Bruckner it was the same.’

Heras-Casado explains how he travelled towards Bruckner on a chronological trajectory, rather than looking at him through the lens of Mahler and Schoenberg. ‘I had conducted a lot of music from the 17th and 18th centuries through to Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, and then lots of Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn. I also studied History of Art [at the Universidad de Granada] and somehow I always need to feel what the roots of a work are. Even when there are revolutionary elements, there is still a sense of continuity, even if they are radical composers. With Bruckner, 15 to 20 years ago I saw him as quite a conservative composer who wrote the same symphony nine times, but now I hold a completely different view. I see the modernistic, revolutionary character (despite his personality) and when I started studying his music, I connected many of my own worlds and previous experiences and could really start to understand him better.’

This is particularly so with period instruments, and without the benefit of 20th-century hindsight. ‘If you take an orchestra that is used to playing Rachmaninov, Shostakovich and Mahler and you want to keep these qualities, then Bruckner’s music will not sound so surprising or modern. For me, it’s much more radical when you don’t see what’s coming.

‘I have been working with period-instrument orchestras all my life. I’ve enjoyed this wonderful journey with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra on many amazing projects, and with the Balthasar Neumann Ensemble and Concentus Musicus Wien. With Bruckner, it has been a bit more radical because I had never stepped so far forwards in the timeline of the history of music. I had already conducted all of Bruckner’s symphonies, but never on period instruments before.

‘With Anima Eterna, we started with the Seventh, which I had conducted many times before, but my attitude is always like a tabula rasa, so we start from zero and try to rediscover, to listen carefully to what these instruments are bringing and what the possibilities are. What are the edges, the limits? Strauss wrote music that he knew would challenge the orchestral players of the time. Bruckner challenged them in the same way.

‘Period brass is very different and very specific in relation to what we know now with these amazingly brilliant, perfect instruments that can do anything. You have to change your perspective, to find a different path in which you reflect and create new qualities and find new voices, new textures. There’s more space for inner counterpoint, inner texture rather than with this “pumped up” brass. For me, it’s also revealing because Bruckner writes a very complex and sophisticated style of counterpoint in which he balances string instruments, a very transparent woodwind section and a lyric – not just powerful, but lyric – brass section.’

We talk about the instruments used in this recording, which include valve trombones and a much smaller tuba than modern audiences would expect. ‘The fantastic thing about Anima Eterna is that they look not only for an instrument that is right for Bruckner, but specifically for the period in which each symphony was composed. At that time, woodwind and brass instruments were developing super fast; from one year to the next there would be a new key, a new valve, a new model. We performed Bruckner’s Seventh, which we didn’t record, but when we went back to the Fourth the F trumpet was different from Leipzig in 1884, where the Seventh was premiered. It could depend on the city or the tradition. Leipzig was not the same as Vienna or Munich, so in this case we used these valve trombones and this small tuba. On the first day of rehearsals, I experienced that if you push a little bit more, some of these instruments could actually break! You cannot just hit the note and create a big sound but, on the contrary, in these beautiful chorales, where the brass doubles other instruments, they can create a wonderful, pure lyric sound and they meld beautifully with the woodwinds.

‘Another fascinating aspect is that with Bruckner one always thinks about the power of these big tuttis, but Bruckner was also a master of creating soft textures and dynamics. The majority of his writing – like Wagner’s – is about the subtleties between piano, pianissimo and ppp. And then you have to put them into the right context. What is a piano? What is a pianissimo? With gut strings, you can achieve wonderfully shaded textures in these dynamics.’

Heras-Casado explains the layout of Anima Eterna for these sessions, violins split antiphonally and with seven double basses lined up across the rear, just as the Vienna Philharmonic employs in the Musikverein. They have recorded the 1878/80 Nowak edition of the score. It seems there was never any question of going with Bruckner’s first (1876) thoughts, which feature a completely different Scherzo.

‘In this most iconic of Bruckner symphonies’, Heras-Casado explains, ‘I always wanted to record the usual version. The next chapter in our Bruckner journey will be the Third Symphony in September and there we will be playing the first version (1873). I do think the revised version of the Third is better – in general, when composers got the chance to improve something, they usually did – but that doesn’t mean that it’s not interesting to explore those first thoughts.’

We talk about Bruckner’s distinctive musical fingerprints: tremolando strings, 2 + 3 (duplet + triplet) rhythms, the long crescendos, chorales and his big unison organ-like chords, the sudden shift from one idea off into an entirely different direction.

‘I think the Fourth is Bruckner’s first mature symphony, where you find a balance of all these elements. The “Romantic” nickname can be misleading. It is Romantic in the same way that Wagner was Romantic, inspired by medieval literature and a sense of chivalry, like Lohengrin. There is this purity of sound, the contact with nature, a sense of universal love. At the beginning of the symphony, one thinks of the morning, shimmering like the Lohengrin Prelude. I like to think of Wagner’s knight wandering through nature; the horn call is like his soul.’

But in that opening horn call, there is ambiguity too. The Fourth was Bruckner’s first symphony in a major key, but as soon as that initial E flat horn motif is repeated, he raises the first note to a C flat to smudge the line with a hint of a minor key. There’s something mysterious in this forest, for sure.

‘The second movement is like a serenade, where he stops to rest and there’s this beautiful viola part with the pizzicati [bar 51], as if he is accompanying himself on the guitar. And then comes the hunting scene, which I like very much. It’s abstract but has a connection to the natural world and this sense of medieval myth.’ We discuss the surging energy of this Scherzo, its propulsive ‘Bruckner rhythm’ and the sense of hunters giving chase, combined with the Ländler-like Trio section where they stop to take lunch. We then get to the final movement and Heras-Casado’s favourite point in the score.

‘After this long medieval journey, the finale is one of the most difficult, strange pieces to shape. It’s challenging because it’s long and there are all these contrasting themes, but the moment you reach the coda [bar 477] …’ He sighs. ‘When that coda starts and the chorale appears, I get goosebumps. The way it builds up harmonically, the bass going down, this is really something. It’s also a real moment for the performers after a demanding hour on stage. It feels like Parsifal – a moment of kneeling before the shrine.’

This article originally appeared in the September 2024 issue of Gramophone. Whether you want to enjoy Gramophone online, explore our unique Reviews Database or our huge archive of issues stretching back to April 1923, or simply receive the magazine through your door every month, we've got the perfect subscription for you. Find out more at magsubscriptions.com