This latest addition to Chailly’s Amsterdam Bruckner cycle begins, in an interesting and mildly provoking way, with four of Hugo Wolf’s Goethe settings, orchestrated by the composer himself. They are the famously desolate Harfenspieler Lieder and Anakreons Grab. (The latter in Wolf’s second orchestration. He left the first on a tram on the way to the post office.)
They receive sympathetic, somewhat muted performances, from Chailly and his baritone, Matthias Goerne. Two moments, in particular, could be said to disappoint: the climax of ‘Wer nie sein Brot’ (‘dann uberlasst ihr ihn der Pein’), where the voice seems devoid of any real sense of terribilita, and the all-important phrase in Anakreons Grab, ‘welch ein Grab ist hier, das alle Gotter mit Leben schon bepflanzt?’, which is uninterestingly sung, with an awkward break before ‘mit’. (Janssen did this, but his far more imposing performance ‘carried’ one by: Schwarzkopf always took the phrase in a single breath.)
An all-too-brief pause between the end of the last Harfenspieler song and the start of Anakreons Grab is unfortunate.
I seem to have misplaced (or perhaps I never actually owned) the three-movement torso of Furtwangler conducting Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony (Berlin, 1943, most recently available on Tahra, 3/95 and EMI, 3/97). I mention this because, if memory serves me aright, Chailly’s performance has a similarly ripe sound, the playing warmly moulded. Tempos are broad (almost as broad as Klemperer’s in his classic 1964 Kingsway Hall recording), though there is nothing gaunt or windswept about Chailly’s reading. This is no Prospero or Lear, but a man in the full leaf and flower of his being, responsive still to life’s sensual music. The slow movement, lovingly shaped and sounded, is especially fine, a performance that confirms the truth of Robert Simpson’s assertion that the Adagio will ‘both withstand and reward the slowest playing that artistry, technique and courage can afford.’
Chailly’s reading could be said interestingly to complement Klemperer’s. What it doesn’t quite achieve (no rival version does) is Klemperer’s sense of the symphony as an exploration and recognition of the shocking yet glorious inevitability of things. Fine as the Chailly is, there are moments (the symphony’s closing pages, for instance) when the old man sails by on his penny-farthing whilst the turbo-charged Concertgebouw-mobile seems momentarily stranded between gears. And what possessed Chailly to introduce at a crucial moment in the symphony – ten bars into the first movement recapitulation just before the low E on the drum that sets up the blazing shift to the tonic A – a coy little subito piano? The CD cover says the performance uses Nowak, but this powder-puff gesture derives from the famously corrupt Hynais edition of 1899.
The Decca recording is superb. It is pleasing to hear the Concertgebouw Orchestra, its woodwinds and brass in particular, sounding much as it used to do in Bruckner in van Beinum’s day, and it is good to hear the hall and the engineers gratefully catching and complementing the effect.'