This is wonderful, and a great surprise. Bitter experience has taught me to give Knappertsbusch's Bruckner a wide berth, not because of his conducting but because of the texts he chose to use. Unrepentant old Luddite that he was, he went on using foreshortened, re-orchestrated, and spuriously annotated editions of several of the Bruckner symphonies he conducted until the day of his death. Happily, the Seventh exists only in a good text. It is true that several editions (including Nowak, which Knappertsbusch seems to be using) print additional tempo markings which are Nikisch's not Bruckner's. Knappertsbusch's reading is as free-spirited as Nikisch's would seem to have been, although there is no evidence that he is following the Nikisch annotations. Conductors who do (such as Klemperer) usually end up sounding stilted, and Knappertsbusch's performance is anything but that.
It is a performance of huge contrasts, rhythmically and dynamically, yet a performance that is sustained, however things may dart and frolic on the surface, by an all-informing pulse that is ocean-deep. There are times when Knappertsbusch seems to arrest time itself and other times when he moves the argument on with a Rosbaud-like briskness. The great melodies are sung with passion, although they never drag. The slow movement's second subject has a tremendous rhythmic swing, yet its status as song is enhanced rather than compromised.
Which is where the Vienna Philharmonic must come in for a share of the honours. Knappertsbusch can afford to take risks because he knows this astonishing band of musicians will follow him over hill and dale, through bush and briar, over park and pale, and even possibly through flood and fire. The slow movement's second subject is a case in point. Where a merely mortal band of orchestral musicians would be reduced to a kind of apologetic skimping and scraping (remember, Knappertsbusch almost certainly did not rehearse this performance) the Vienna Philharmonic players hang limpet-like to the contour of the melody, enriching it as they play, never abandoning a note until the very last possible moment. It is playing of astonishing intensity born of a craft that Bruckner himself knew and wrote for. How gorgeous are the first movement's great melodic outpourings; how concentrated the symphony's moments of absolute quiet, the music humped in silence; how exalted yet also how pain-racked the coda to the Adagio, the great Wagner threnody.
Rightly, given its festal origin, this is not a performance for every day. Nor can it be said to be the usual way of playing this symphony. Yet the work itself – this marvellous emanation of a Protean mind – seems to revel in the treatment, like some gorgeous young creature being wined and dined by an infatuated and extremely dangerous admirer.
The small Festival Hall in Salzburg gives bloom to the sound, which the dry and very focused Austrian Radio recording does its best to retract. There is the occasional clump and crackle, suggesting that the performance may possibly have been recorded on disc rather than tape. But there is no noticeable surface noise, nor any serious distortion; and the audience was clearly so taken aback by the whole thing that the transfer engineer has time to spirit us out of the hall before the applause breaks out in all its matter of fact.
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