Juilliard Orchestra Performs Bruckner at Lincoln Center

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Thursday, 04 January 2024 20:40

Written by Jack Angstreich

Photo by Claudio Papapietro.

At Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall, on the evening of Monday, December 11th, I had the considerable privilege to attend a superb concert—it was an excellent performance of Anton Bruckner’s titanic, glorious Symphony No. 8—presented by the impressive musicians of the Juilliard Orchestra under the outstanding direction of guest conductor, Donald Runnicles.

The symphony is Bruckner’s last completed one. Exceptionally helpful notes for this program were produced by Thomas May who “is the English-language editor for the Lucerne Festival and writes about the arts for a wide variety of publications. His books include Decoding Wagner and The John Adams Reader.” He provides some useful background on this Bruckner masterpiece:

When it was premiered in December 1892, accord- ing to the scholar Benjamin Korstvedt, the Eighth “marked a turning point” in the cultural war between conservatives and the faction that proclaimed Bruckner to be Beethoven’s legitimate heir: “While the concert did not wholly win over Bruckner’s antagonists, it did seem to convince them that, if nothing else, Bruckner had finally secured a lasting place as a symphonist.”

The annotator cites the comment of Robert Simpson, author of The Essence of Bruckner, that “The sweeping dramatic force of the Eighth is almost new in Bruckner.” May adds about the composer:

He was 60 when he began composing it in 1884. The triumphant premiere of the Seventh seemed a long-overdue vindication, a signal that the tide of public opinion had finally shifted in his favor. After three years of labor, Bruckner was eager to show the freshly completed score of the Eighth to Hermann Levi, the eminent first conductor ofParsifal. Levi had helped champion the Seventh, and his opinion mattered greatly to Bruckner. But the Eighth perplexed Levi— another clue as to how different this music is from what preceded it.

Levi’s rejection devastated Bruckner. The composer responded by making radical revisions to the original score he had completed in 1887. This later version, prepared in 1890, was the basis for the first publication as well as the premiere in 1892, which took place in Vienna under the Wagnerian conductor Hans Richter. The extent to which Bruckner’s well-meaning but intrusive assistants imposed their own revisions on this later version—attempting to tailor Bruckner’s conception to contemporary taste—is among the complications subsequent editors have had to address.

Another issue has to do with the composer’s own attitude toward the 1890 revisions, which involved several cuts, some rewriting, and an expanded woodwind section. While the revision improved certain aspects of the music as a whole, some scholars have regretted the cuts that were made, citing them as an example of Bruckner acting against his own better judgment, still shaken as he was by Levi’s rejection.

May quotes the editor of the version played at this concert:

Yet, wrote Leopold Nowak in the preface to his edition of the 1890 version, which he published in 1955—and which we hear in this performance led by Donald Runnicles—“a complete critical edition must not mix its sources: The result would be a score that would not tally with either version and would certainly not be in accordance with Bruckner’s wishes.” The composer’s acceptance of “other people’s opinions,” adds Nowak, “does not warrant ignoring alterations in Bruckner’s own hand.”

The initial movement, marked Allegro moderato, has a solemn, portentous introduction, but the emergence of a lyrical—even pastoral—theme alters the mood; a Wagneriangrandeuris intermittently attained and the movement closes quietly. May remarks that “Bruckner’s 1890 revision underlines the sense of despair, dispensing with the heavy-handed proclamation that originally ended the movement,” and that the composer called this revision the “Death Watch.”

On the next movement, the annotator has this to say:

For the first time in his symphonies, Bruckner positions his Scherzo second in order. Simpson famously compared the mechanistic regularity of its main theme to “the constant thud of a colossal celestial engine beyond even Milton’s imagining.” Bruckner’s manic repetitions at times seem to anticipate aspects of Minimalism. The slower trio introduces another “first time” in Bruckner’s symphonies—the presence of harps [ . . . . ]

The movement, also anAllegro moderato,begins excitingly and is frequently suspenseful and builds to a thrilling finish; the contrasting Trio section provides glimpses of a celestial innocence but does not seem entirely free from an uncharacteristic irony even if this is not inappropriate in ascherzo.

May describes the third movement thus:

Set in D-flat Major, the vast Adagio seems at first to promise peace, yet much of it is imbued with an unexpected yearning. The opening gesture—a slowly syncopated pattern in the low strings—alludes to the “Night of Love” music from the second act ofTristan und Isolde. Yet Bruckner’s sensibility lies worlds apart from Wagner’s.

The movement has an unexpected intensity, almost Mahlerian at moments, but with some reflective passages, although it is nonetheless dramatic at times and here as well there are heavenly intimations. May records that “Following a powerful climax, Bruckner brings the Adagio to a close with a spacious coda.”

The finale opens exhilaratingly but then alternates with music of a sometimes more meditative quality until it reaches an astonishing, fugue-like conclusion.

The musicians deservedly received an enthusiastic ovation.