For many years, Bruckner's so-called Romantic Symphony was the most frequently performed and recorded of all his symphonic works. Happily, tastes change and mature and nowadays the glorious Seventh has taken its place. In the right hands, though, the Fourth can still make its mark. Indeed, a skilled conductor can make it seem not only dramatic and highly atmospheric but also representative of Bruckner's mature (or maturing) art in a way that does not necessarily square with the facts as we have them. It is the finale (cut in the old Eulenburg Edition and on some older recordings) which poses the particular problem and it is there that the master Brucknerian, or merely the master conductor, is most likely to show his hand.
The first trouble-spot comes at fig.C of the finale where, in Robert Simpson's words: ''Orion, hitherto so majestic in the sky, seems to be catching flies''. And the deeper we get into the movement, the deeper the morass can seem to become. There is a particularly unfortunate stretch between figs. P and Q (12'28'' ff. in Janowski's new recording, 15'12'' ff. in Abbado's), a supererogatory tutti that gets tarted up in some editions and performances by a poco a poco accelerando followed by a grandiose Langsamer. In a great performance of the Fourth, the gait and temper of the playing will probably solve the problem at fig.C, and a mixture of interpretative restraint and interpretative guile will render the tutti at fig.P stupendous rather than silly.
Turning to the two newest recordings, Janowski is never particularly impressive when the going gets rough. Much of the symphony is decently conducted and decently played but it is difficult to feel that the orchestra is entirely on home ground or that Janowski has that sense of the longer, thoroughgoing musical pulse that marks out the men from the boys in Bruckner interpretation. Though his tempo is more or less identical with Abbado's or Bohm's at the very outset, Janowski comes dangerously near to beaching the symphony before we have reached fig.A. If the harmonic shifts in the hushed string pulses don't register, the whole thing can become very static. Bohm in his fine 1973 Decca performance and Abbado both avoid this, as does Klemperer in his wonderfully incisive and atmospheric 1963 EMI account which takes a much brisker view of the music—minim=84 to his rivals' minim=60. There is also the question of the actual gait of the second subject group. In Lincolnshire in the old days, they used to say you could distinguish between Church people and Chapel people by the way they put their feet down. And you can tell one Bruckner orchestra from another in exactly the same way. In a word, the Vienna Philharmonic—Bohm's orchestra and Abbado's—has the true autochthonous Austrian feel, where the French Radio orchestra does not. Under Janowski, they sound especially glib at fig.C of the finale, where the non-Austrian Philharmonia Orchestra under Klemperer are anything but that. Klemperer invests the little C major subject with an air of quiet pathos and because he has his violins split left and right we can at least marvel at the charming intricacy of Bruckner's counterpoint at this juncture. Klemperer also keeps the notorious tutti at fig.P on a very tight rein, where Janowski, who is less concerned with keeping that longer-term pulse in view, rather tends to play to the gallery. In the event, it is a case of drowning when he thinks he is waving. Both Bohm and Abbado are much more imposing at this point; they manipulate the music but do so with real dramatic flair.
They also take a broader view of the finale. Bruckner marks the movement to be played with motion ''but not too fast'' which is what conductors should heed rather than the largely meaningless alla breve marking that crops up in some editions (Nowak's, for example, used by both Abbado and Janowski). Klemperer is swift; but that is his style in this symphony, and successfully so, even in the slow movement where the main theme in the cellos is wonderfully crisp and clear, the whole thing, very properly, a quasi Allegretto. Abbado is more expressive here and his finale is splendidly measured, though I must say I don't much care for the over-prominent second violin line at the very outset. By and large, Abbado's reading is close to Bohm's—a wonderful marshalling of Bruckner's music and the unique properties of the Vienna Philharmonic as a Bruckner orchestra to produce a performance that is grand and cogent and full of atmosphere. I don't think it surpasses the Bohm as a performance or even as a recording. The sound the Decca engineers achieved in the Sofiensaal in 1973 is almost every bit as good as that achieved by the DG engineers in the Musikverein in 1990. The Klemperer is obviously older, but here too the sound characteristics of the reading are superbly conveyed by the recording.
I would want Klemperer's reading in my collection as well as Bohm's, not least because of Klemperer's reversion in the Trio to the oboe-led version we find in Haas's 1944 printing of the score. (The Klemperer, unlike the Bohm or the Abbado, also has the advantage of being available on cassette.) Abbado's, though, is quite the finest of the recent Bruckner Fourths on record. Like his magisterial and perspicacious recent recording of Brahms's Third Symphony (DG, 1/91), rightly praised by ES, it shows a combination of musical shrewdness and emotional abandon that has often been there in the opera house in the past but which the more buttoned-up Abbado of the concert platform has often signally failed to provide in the great nineteenth-century symphonic masterworks.'