As you will gather from the above digest of the 20 or so available recordings, it is a more than usually confused and scattered scene where Bruckner’s Third Symphony is concerned. Vanska and the BBC Scottish SO now add complication to confusion by incorporating into a recording of the first ‘definitive’ revision of 1877 the revision of the Adagio which Bruckner had made the previous year but partly suppressed. (Bruckner aficionados may wish to read that sentence again; others may frown and pass on.)
Listening to the disc, Hans Sachs’s phrase ‘Madness, madness! Everywhere madness!’ came frequently to mind. We currently know more about Bruckner editions than has ever been the case, which is fine. Yet where recordings are concerned, we no longer seem to be able to see the wood for the trees. Particularly mystifying is Hyperion’s entry into the field: further proof of Bruckner’s insidious ability to draw normally sane people into this crazy world of ‘editions’. (In his excellent note, Stephen Johnson points out that during the course of a serious nervous breakdown in 1866-67 Bruckner was discovered in a field attempting to count the leaves on a tree.)
The Third Symphony is a particularly frustrating case. Here we are with more than 20 extant recordings in three – now four – performing editions, yet, when all’s said and done, it is the same work: a second-rate symphony, rich in fine ideas but irredeemably flawed structurally.
In this respect, the ‘version’ to have is either the fresh-faced 1873 original (in Inbal’s pioneering recording) or the 1889 truncation, which scholars frown on, but which has the merit of being an effective abridgement. (Szell and Karajan and their respective orchestras blaze brilliantly through it; Wand goes one stage further and actually makes it effective as an abridgement.)
All of which leaves the 1877 version in a kind of musical no man’s land, with Vanska’s incorporation of the 1876 Adagio further miring it in the mud. Robert Simpson was rightly critical of the way the 1876 revision exacerbates the Adagio’s already considerable longueurs. In Vanska’s performance it comes out at 21 minutes, the symphony’s longest movement. Compare this with Inbal/1873 where the movements are proportionately 24-19-6-16 or the Wand/1889 where the timings are 21-13-7-13.
The lure, if any exists here, is Vanska himself. A distinguished Sibelian (and fine Beethovenian), he conducts Bruckner with power and understanding and draws rich and finely nuanced playing from the BBC Scottish SO’s strings (the violas’ contribution is especially memorable). The recording, too, is very fine, spacious yet focused with the acoustic of St Mary’s Church, Haddington, East Lothian, capable of accommodating both gauntness and warmth. Tintner’s epic Naxos reading of the original 1873 version with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra is never quite in this league orchestrally or technically, though where native Austrian guile is concerned, in the finale’s polka-cum-chorale especially, neither team is a match for Bohm and the Vienna Philharmonic, who remain in a class of their own.'