Listening to Nikolaus Harnoncourt's lyrical, finely nuanced reading of the first movement of the Seventh Symphony, I was reminded of Sir Donald Tovey's remark about Bruckner consciously shaping his music 'so as to present to us the angle [my emphasis] of its relation to sonata form'. Tovey did not intend this as a compliment but it serves to remind us that a Bruckner symphony more closely resembles a sculpture to be walked around than a two-dimensional canvas. Harnoncourt's multi-perspectived contemplation of the symphony's Apollonian first movement is both illuminating and thought-provoking.
This is Harnoncourt's first symphonic recording with the Vienna Philharmonic. In the music of Bruckner, no orchestra can match either the sound culture or the autochthonous musical craft of the Philharmonic, though it is not an orchestra that hands over the keys to the cathedral treasury on demand. I have heard it render the Seventh Symphony as featureless as an urban car park under one Italian conductor and turn it into a form of military two-step under another.
There are no such cultural lacunae here. The orchestra may have waited an unconscionable length of time before agreeing to record with Harnoncourt but the playing they now offer him is alpha quality and echt Wienerisch. If the performance does not, in the final analysis, quite 'add up' as some earlier Philharmonic recordings (live and studio) have done it is probably due to time. And here I'm thinking not of rhythm or pulse - Harnoncourt's management of these is more straightforward than I had dared imagine - but simply a lack of hours, days, months, years in which to work things through.
The performance was recorded live during the 1999 Vienna Festival. Of the four movements, the first is the one which seems to have been most intensively and effectively 'worked' by Harnoncourt and the orchestra. The performance of the second movement I do have problems with. The Scherzo, Trio and finale go well, though there is less sense here of an individual interpretation: orchestra (and engineers) often happy to busk the transitions and let rip at the big climaxes.
In general, Harnoncourt's reading differs from those listed above in being more lyrical, less 'grand', even in the first movement. The awed yet awesome transition to the first-movement coda (16'29''), in which a fragment of the opening subject emerges lofty in A major over a pedal E on the drum, is here confiding and intimate, spoken in an undertone. It is most affecting, though it could be argued that it doesn't quite prepare us for the coda's torrential utterance as, say, Furtwangler's epic account of the transition does. Under Harnoncourt the transition is magical, the coda brighter and brassier.
I was less happy with Harnoncourt's pacing and accentuation of the great C sharp minor Adagio. The first surprise comes in bar 4 where the rising sequence of string chords is bowed in a way which separates each chord from its neighbour. One can see what Harnoncourt is trying to do in relation to the printed page. In practice, though, it is a case of semantics winning out over musical sense. The effect of these barely perceptible but none the less enervating 'decayed' diminuendos is a fatal weakening of the musical line. With Knappertsbusch (Salzburg, 1949), Furtwangler (Cairo, 1951), Giulini (Vienna, 1986) and Karajan (Vienna, 1989) the line has clearly been established first, then the accentuation has been added. That, surely, is the right way round. In the famously exalted and enchanting second subject (3'34''), Harnoncourt's tempo, already quite fluent, becomes very flowing indeed, the music coming perilously close to the mood of a meditation by Ketelbey. Since the wonderful 16-bar transition (5'00'') which leads back to the brooding opening subject lacks real tension here - compare the rapt dialogue of cellos and first violins in the Giulini recording - the whole episode can be said to be misconceived.
The Adagio, it is true, is later allowed to gather powerfully to its climax, and the 'Wagner' coda is finely enunciated, held on course by some predictably fine Vienna Philharmonic brass playing; but the mood of this solemn C sharp minor 'let me not be confounded' slow movement is more tellingly explored by the old masters listed above.
An interesting record, then, though not quite benchmark Bruckner for the new millennium which some collectors might have been anticipating or hoping for.'