A Bruggen performance is always a special event, and this is no exception. The account of the Marche funebre will probably excite most interest even controversy given the relative swiftness of the tempo. Normally conductors treat the movement as a slow-moving catafalque draped in purples and mourning black. Yet the metronome suggests otherwise and a swifter tempo gives the music something of the concentration of mood Beethoven was later to achieve in the equivalent movement of the Seventh Symphony. But this is also the movement in which the period instruments—spare sounding strings, acrid, keening brass, and lonely disjunct drum taps—make their most potent effect. In Bruggen's performance more than in Hogwood's more traditional sounding account on L'Oiseau-Lyre it is an essay in sonorities that are as explosive as they are unpredictable, a funeral march so radical in its soundscape that after it even Berlioz sounds old-fashioned.
In other respects, Bruggen is a sophisticated romantic. His tempo for the first movement, like Hogwood's, is in the region of 48 bars to the minute, but unlike the classical direct Hogwood he drops back at fig. C to a lingering espressivo 40. The pulse is one Furtwangler or Koussevitzky might have approved. But the textures are much clearer. Inner voices have an almost balletic brilliance of movement, and the sound of the horns and trumpets grinding out the excruciating climax to the first movement development is something not even a Toscanini or a Monteux could draw from modern instruments. The first movement also benefits from having its exposition repeat and trumpets at bar 658 sticking to simple repetitions on the dominant with a proper ff tutti 13 bars later.
The last two movements are played with a good deal of zest. The Scherzo is rapid and rumbustious and there are some quickish tempos in parts of the finale. The rhythm isn't always very steady in the finale and in the heat of the moment of the live performances there are moments of raggedness in pitching and chording which Hogwood's players generally avoid. But you might argue that this merely adds to the defiant, explosive, unpredictable mood of the music as Bruggen conceives it.
Certainly, Bruggen catches very vividly, and with some mature, responsible music-making, the work's many-sidedness. As for the recording, it conveys with admirable clarity and a decent degree of in-hall reverberative spaciousness the gunpowder-keg sonorities of this remarkable music.
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