The other day, a friend handed me a review of these recordings which began with the words: ‘This has to be the greatest Bruckner set ever released.’
‘A generous gesture,’ I harrumphed, ‘but if you believe that, you’ll believe anything.’ He hadn’t, though after I had completed my listening I sent off a postcard conceding that superlatives were in order here. Occasionally.
It was Bruckner’s music to which Celibidache (a late convert to Zen Buddhism, a fact much advertised here) became most intimately attached during the course of his long, distinguished and often controversial career. Mature Bruckner, that is. Celibidache’s Bruckner journey began with the Third Symphony: with the Fourth, in effect, since he always performed the Third in the foreshortened and heavily reorchestrated remake of 1889. As someone once said of the late P. G. Wodehouse, if he’d had a son, he’d have wanted him to be born aged 11, complete with his prep school cricket colours.
These are all recordings of live recordings, the initiative of Serge Ioan Celibidache, a devoted and conscience-stricken son, torn between a sure knowledge of his father’s loathing of all forms of recording and his own urge to commemorate and preserve his father’s vision and craft. There is a good deal about this in the booklets which accompany the individual CDs: high-flown stuff, much of it rather silly. Even if the gramophone was the invention of the devil, it is difficult to take exception to its role as chronicler; nor, listening to the best of these recordings, is it easy to understand why Celibidache so distrusted it.
True, the gramophone is impatient of eccentricity, but, in most of the essentials of music-making, Celibidache was not an eccentric. His rhythms are steady, building unerringly over huge spans of time; the phrasing breathes and sings in sweet concourse. And ‘spontaneity’, that over-used buzz word of an impatient century? The greatness of Celibidache’s finest interpretations rests largely in the fact that they were thought through and rehearsed with immense care. The idea that the performances were, in some sense, quasi-improvised is the purest baloney. True, they must live (and the best of these do just that) but it is not only concert-hall renditions that take wing.
As a thinker, Celibidache was part genius, part crank. (This Bruckner set reveals both aspects.) A bizarre aggregation of musical, spiritual and quasi-scientific ideas led him to believe that because of what he called ‘epiphenomena’ – the need for each note to sound, resonate and return – it was necessary to place round the music an inordinate amount of space: ‘The richer the music, the slower the tempo.’
Which brings us the nub of this review, since it is Celibidache’s overriding preoccupation with slowness, with temporal space, which helps conjure forth what I believe is one of the greatest Bruckner performances I have ever heard – this 1987 account of the Fourth Symphony, a truly towering act of the re-creative imagination – and several that are well-nigh interminable.
The uniqueness of this reading of the Fourth Symphony was first flagged in the revised edition of Robert Simpson’s The Essence of Bruckner (Gollancz: 1992). Talking of the finale’s second subject, Simpson wrote: ‘It needs to be played doppio meno mosso for its full breadth to emerge. Sergiu Celibidache has magnificently shown that the whole of this Finale is really an adagio ….’ I would put it slightly differently: not an adagio (Bruckner does not indicate it thus, nor does Celibidache play it as such) but a forward-moving movement to which the adagio mood is all-important. In the midst of life we are in death.
What makes this doubly fascinating is that what Simpson noticed in the finale of the Fourth Symphony actually applies to all Celibidache’s Bruckner performances. His initial tempos are often quite sprightly. It is when he gets to the second and third subjects – to the great Gesangsperiode in each movement – that he drops down many more gears than most Bruckner conductors would dare imagine. What Celibidache gives us, in effect, is a sequence of slow movements within the symphonic continuum. In each case, the slow movement itself is the crown (what a revelation his reading of the slow movement of the Sixth Symphony is!), the dark sun at the centre of the Bruckner universe around which the adagio sections of the opening and closing movements (and the third movement Trio) slowly circle.
The problems come in the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Symphonies where the adage ‘the richer the music, the slower the tempo’ causes broadenings that render entirely otiose the idea of the symphony as dramatic discourse.
Given the distinctive nature of Celibidache’s interpretative approach, clock time is not a wholly reliable measure, though it does give us some useful pointers. The Haas edition of the Eighth Symphony (Celibidache uses the slightly shorter Nowak edition) gives an estimated playing time of 78 minutes. Many conductors are quicker than this (cf. Celibidache’s withering put-down ‘These camel drivers haven’t understood a thing about Bruckner’). Some are slower. But even these – Karajan with the VPO taking 83 minutes or Giulini, also with the VPO, taking 87 minutes – are as the flash of a swallow’s wing alongside the dinosaur flap of Celibidache’s record-breaking 104 minutes.
I remember talking to someone in the Lake District, an experienced fell-walker, who would occasionally set out on wet, murky days with the deliberate aim of getting lost. Putting Celibidache’s Bruckner Eighth into the CD player is a bit like that: a reading for the expert Brucknerian with an in-built desire to do something daft.
The performance of the Seventh Symphony is almost as odd. Here Haas gives an estimated playing time of 68 minutes, which is how Karajan’s hypnotically beautiful 1971 EMI recording works out. Par for the course is nearer 62 or 63 minutes. Celibidache takes nigh on 80. In a way, I found this more depressing than his account of the Eighth. That, at least, is an adventure, however bizarre. In the case of the Seventh, the visibility is better; you can see the landscape laid out before you, and the slow-moving sky which you know, all too depressingly, will not lighten before nightfall.
The account of the Ninth Symphony offers a locus classicus of the Celibidache method, with the whole of the first movement’s second subject group played as a vast, slow-moving lyric parenthesis. (Did Jeffrey Tate ever hear Celibidache conduct the Seventh, I wonder? His deleted EMI recording – 11/91 – was similarly slow, though without Celibidache’s evident grip.) I could live with this performance – the Scherzo suitably momentous, the wry, glinting Trio played in a tempo that is perfectly proportionate to that of the Scherzo – though the Giulini, similarly monumental, is better played and the Munich PO’s pioneering pre-war recording under Hausegger is in some respects the more interesting performance. (More various: the interest is not only historical.)
Since the symphonies and the F minor Mass are available separately, the performances to acquire are those of the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies. The Fifth, too, if you don’t already have one of Jochum’s performances or Karajan’s 1975 Berlin recording to which the Celibidache is surprisingly close in tempo and style, even though the manner of the music-making is a good deal earthier.
All these Munich performances are centred in string playing of astonishing depth, eloquence and homogeneity. As with Giulini, it is the viola and cello sections which seem to harbour the very soul of the music. The viola cantilenas in the slow movements of the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies are things of rare beauty. Interestingly, the best of a variable array of booklet-essays is the one on the Fourth Symphony entitled ‘The Om in E flat major’ by solo viola player Helmut Nicolai, a defector from Karajan’s Berlin Philharmonic. (A fine essay, sensitively translated, as are all the essays, by Janet and Michael Berridge.)
I was surprised at first, and a little disappointed, to find Celibidache taking so robust a view of the outer movements of the Sixth Symphony. The finale is always played too quickly and after his triumph with the finale of the Fourth, I had expected real insight here. Yet I find Celibidache persuasive none the less. In his hands the symphony emerges as a distant descendant of Beethoven’s Symphony in A, the Dionysiac Seventh, which also has a funeral march at its centre, albeit a subtler, more esoteric one than Bruckner’s. In Celibidache’s performance, the Sixth Symphony’s slow movement portends tragedy of an order met with only in the Funeral March of the Eroica Symphony or the great laments of Bruckner’s own last three symphonies. That it ends, glowing like a Styrian hillside lit by the late summer sun is Bruckner’s triumph, and Celibidache’s, too, so wonderfully does he effect the ascent from deepest gloom to abundant, life-affirming splendour.
The ensemble playing, even in the best performances, is not faultless. Celibidache occasionally has trouble getting woodwind and brass in together; the solo flute can play like a seraph but the flutes en masse are tentative, and the clarinet playing is chancy – except in the Fifth Symphony where it is wonderfully mellifluous and, in the cockcrows at the start of the finale, downright funny. The brass playing is generally first-rate. But it is the strings that one comes back to. The rehearsal sequence that has been tacked on to the recording of the Ninth Symphony reveals one or two secrets of the cuisine but you learn more about Celibidache’s methods from Helmut Nicolai’s essay, after which you can put on the CD and hear the extraordinary effect of all Celibidache’s work in the opening moments of the Fourth Symphony.
The recordings have weight, warmth and immediacy, with enough air around them to avoid a sense of incipient or actual claustrophobia. The choral works, though, fare less well. In the Te Deum, the choir is a misty irrelevance. You hear more of it in the F minor Mass but neither the recording nor the choral or solo singing is in the top flight. Despite Celibidache’s occasional flashes of insight, there are better versions of both works to be had elsewhere.
The transfers have been well done. Applause (rarely instantaneous, Celibidache clearly had his public well trained) is separately banded, and the pauses between movements are ‘live’, and feel right in context.
Thus we have the best of all worlds, live music-making sensitively preserved on record. For, whatever Celibidache himself might have thought or argued, recordings give us privacy and time: time to hear these deeply contemplative and astonishingly long-drawn readings on occasions of our choosing, alone or in company, away from the bustle and discomfort of the concert hall.
Ironically, it was his hated rival, Karajan (‘that Coca-Cola conductor’) who put it best when he wrote: ‘Once one has acquired the record, once it’s one’s own, one aspires musically and spiritually to appropriate it by frequent listening.’
That, I guarantee, is what you will find yourself doing with the best of these recordings.'