Budget-price Bruckner is something of a rarity in the record catalogues; super-budget Bruckner more or less unheard of. The reasons are not far to seek. Front-rank orchestras at full strength do not come cheap. As for reissues: here one is up against the fact that the grandees who record Bruckner best (and their heirs and benefactors) are often disinclined to do business with labels that promise to pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap.
Arte Nova Classics, a BMG subsidiary, are now threatening to put an end to all that with what, on the evidence of the present discs, is a not unsuccessful raid on the Bruckner archive of Saarbrucken Radio. The recordings were made between 1991 and 1994 in the Kongresshalle in Saarbrucken. The sound is very agreeable: good without being absolutely first-rate. (The balance of the trumpets is a touch backward in places and there is sometimes a lack of transparency in the string sound.) The Second Symphony, under Wakasugi’s direction, is beautifully caught, the recording mellow and clear. Skrowaczewski, by contrast, gets a bigger, darker, rather more rugged sound from the orchestra; as a consequence the recordings themselves seem closer and rather more forbidding.
Skrowaczewski is a fine Brucknerian. It is not for nothing that I (and others) praised to the skies his Halle recording of the Fourth Symphony (Pickwick, 3/94; now on Carlton). Like the Halle, the Saarbrucken Radio orchestra do not turn every obscure, quiet corner of the music with absolute surety, but the playing under Skrowaczewski is robust, often refined and frequently eloquent.
As to his readings, they are big, dark-textured, and fairly slow in places. That of the Seventh Symphony is very impressive in its way, though newcomers to the symphony may think it pretty forbidding, a Gotterdammerung of a piece. Compare this with Karajan’s pantheistic rapture (see above) or the stride and Schwung of Knappertsbusch c1949 (Music & Arts, 12/95). In the case of the Eighth, Arte Nova actually dub the work “Symphony No. 8, Apocalyptic”. Here, Skrow-aczewski manoeuvres the building blocks with tenacity and skill, but, again, slowly; this is a performance, like the Egyptian pyramids, that is a long time in the making. But, then, so is the 1957 Karajan (listed above), which is itself an altogether weightier affair than the rather more bracing but less well-recorded 1956 Horenstein set.
Hiroshi Wakasugi is a less forbidding Brucknerian. I don’t think he makes a great deal of the Ninth Symphony, for all his good intentions. The first movement promises a great deal but ends up dying as many deaths as Sir John Falstaff. The Scherzo lacks menace, as does the symphony’s terrible C sharp minor climax.
That said, Wakasugi’s performance of the Second Symphony is a delight. He plays the complete text and plays it with fluency and affection. He has a keen eye for the letter of the score, a keen ear for its Schubertian sonorities, and an even keener instinct for the flow and continuity of its rhythms and the logic of the whole. Karajan, at full price on DG (2/87), is the only real rival here, a performance of exceptional beauty and intensity. But anyone happening upon this most advantageously priced Wakasugi recording is also likely to find a friend for life, in both the music and its performance.'