For a long time it was the done thing to speak of the “organ sonority” of Bruckner’s symphonies, or of their contrapuntal gigantism inherited from Bach, while forgetting everything the Master of Sankt Florian owed to Schubert — not least in the First Symphony (Linz version), which might well be seen as the “sequel” to the Symphony No. 9 in C major, “the Great”. Tonight’s programme allows us not only to grasp more clearly the structural and musical kinships binding the two composers, but also to reflect on the notion of incompleteness — relative, as we shall see, and at times wrapped in fantasy. Philippe Jordan, at home in this repertoire from his years with the Wiener Symphoniker, is the Orchestre de Paris’s guest, and offers a handsome reading, controlled and transparent, of the two most famous unfinished symphonies in the repertoire.
An elegant, chamber-scaled Unfinished
When Schubert set about writing this famous symphony, the Eighth, in 1822, he was very ill. Why the score was left incomplete remains a mystery: did the composer knowingly refuse to finish his work — as Beethoven did when he answered, of his Piano Sonata No. 32, op. 111, “I had no time to write a third [movement]”? Sketches for a scherzo survive; some have proposed playing the great Entr’acte in B minor from Rosamunde (same key, same spirit) to complete the work. Nothing avails: the Unfinished Symphony is sufficient unto itself, in its two sublime movements, the quintessence of Schubert’s spirit — bittersweet melancholy, crepuscular at times, always suffused with an infinite tenderness.
The opening, usually played very darkly, surprises by an exquisite near-triple piano and a bewildering beauty of sound. With no pathetic languishing (the adjective is chosen deliberately, for Tchaikovsky would use the same rare key of B minor for his Sixth) and no tragic indulgence, Philippe Jordan skilfully turns the warm, reverberant acoustic of the Philharmonie de Paris’s Grande Salle Pierre Boulez to account, letting the cellos and double basses sing — remarkably attentive in their shading — along with the fine velvet of the strings: this is appeasement, serenity, gentleness. Often dramatised and tortured, as though announcing the historical tragedies to come, this first movement is played here with great elegance and a direction at once very precise and surprisingly chamber-like. Every desk is given its due; it is always singing, if never cutting. The close of the Allegro moderato, a plaintive cantilena, remains throughout controlled and transparent. The second movement, Andante con moto, in E major, at a fairly sustained tempo, glances towards Beethoven and even Berlioz, with the impeccable oboe of Alexandre Gattet; and in the turn of several modulations one already senses the world of Bruckner. Jordan stays faithful to his lightened approach, his refusal of monumentality, of pathos and of drama. The pianissimi are remarkable: it is very beautiful, very well conducted — but emotion and drama remain somewhat absent from this reading.
A narrative, analytical, Wagnerian Bruckner Ninth
Philippe Jordan adopts the same elegant, transparent, analytical — in short, Apollonian — outlook, marked by clarity and an eye for detail: his Bruckner Ninth Symphony refuses all cult of suffering, and explores a few Wagnerian echoes. One feels the opera conductor at work. From the first movement, Feierlich, misterioso (“solemn, mysterious”), Jordan opts for a strongly narrative approach, with a sense of momentum and an avowed determination neither to cultivate sound for its own sake nor to play the card of mystery. If there is a swan song here, it is that of Lohengrin — youthful, suggesting an active quest. The brass are to the fore, not least the famous Wagner tubas, which lend the orchestra an epic colouring a Howard Shore would remember when illustrating the story of another ring. Philippe Jordan is “a force in motion”, without Giulini’s hovering contemplation, still less Celibidache’s “zen” experience. One savours these passages of great nobility, this travelling, propulsive tone, which shows us how fully Bruckner stands in the Schubertian line — that of the Wanderer, advancing along the paths of some summit above a sea of cloud, while tubas and trombones bring generous sonorities up from the depths of the earth. The final bars, with their incandescent brass, impress and move by their refusal to concede anything, by their doubt and even their blackness. Bruckner may have dedicated this symphony “to dear God”, but one senses how far he was, perhaps, from certainty: the gates of Paradise do not open easily.
The Scherzo — bold and modern in its breathless, almost mechanistic hammering, prefiguring Prokofiev and even Stravinsky (and not forgetting what seems a reminiscence of the descent into Nibelheim in this music of colliding rhythms) — offers Dantesque visions, doubts and apparitions turned over and over, timidly calmed by the superb pastoral oboe. Obsessive, and conducted throughout with impressive command and great technical assurance from an Orchestre de Paris deeply committed and closely attentive to the conductor’s intentions, this movement stands out as one of the evening’s major successes.
The Adagio, finally, traces its tragic arabesques, with an opening Mahler would later take up in his own Ninth. The doubts seem to fade and we recover the Schubertian melancholy, that chamber-scaled clarity which has been the evening’s leitmotiv. The vertigo of the Scherzo dissolves, thanks to a few smiling flutes and to the strings, always impressive in their remarkable shading. We know that Bruckner worked on his symphony until the end, and that its finale was to be a kind of apotheosis, with a coda at least as powerful as that of the Eighth. Alas, he could not complete it, and for decades now some have laboured to reconstruct whole stretches of the score and propose a performable version, after the manner of Deryck Cooke’s inspired work on Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. For the moment, though, nothing seems truly convincing, notwithstanding Sir Simon Rattle’s fine achievement in Berlin, opening the gates of Valhalla in a majestic, assertive, spectacular finale. The work’s unfinished state thus lets us appreciate all the ambiguity of the three movements that have come down to us, in the writing (the dissonances anticipate the sonic experiments of a Schoenberg) as much as in the spirit: one feels how preoccupied Bruckner was with the testamentary dimension of his opus ultimum, quoting whole passages of his masses and his symphonies without hesitation. Seen in that light, Philippe Jordan’s reading convinces; it is the music above all, the very singing of the orchestra, the attention paid to detail, that succeeds in revealing how far this symphony opens the gates not of paradise but of the music of the future.
The present tendency is rather to lighten Bruckner, dispersing the clouds of incense that long covered the music of “God’s Minstrel”. But in giving priority to detail and transparency one can at times lack the loftiness of view and the spirituality that Bruckner’s music requires, where majesty, mysticism and transcendence saturate the score (one will turn, now as ever, to Jochum and Wand); and one would have liked more time taken (this Adagio is marked Sehr langsam, feierlich, “very slow, solemn”) to give oneself over to the work’s more contemplative passages. Here Philippe Jordan ultimately stresses a blacker side of Bruckner, and the emphatic dissonances tend towards Munch’s The Scream, a form of existential violence. The appeasement of the final bars, however — always finely shaded, more luminous — turns the symphony towards a kind of surrender to the beyond. But let us not forget that this Brucknerian “Unfinished” is in D minor, the key of Mozart’s Requiem.
The concert can be heard again on France Musique: radiofrance.fr
Read also: Bruckner’s Eighth — Manfred Honeck and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra · Bruckner, Symphony No. 7 — Paul Kletzki
