There’s no better entry point to Bruckner
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
At the risk of provoking premature exasperation, I’m about to start the Bruckner bicentennial year a few days early. The Dutchman Bernard Haitink was a natural Brucknerian, more so than he was a Mahlerian. He had an innate grasp of structure and knew how to withhold passion and when to let rip. While Karajan, Wand and Giulini stole Bruckner’s thunder in the record stores, Haitink stuck to his meticulous ways with the symphonies, laying down markers for a longer posterity….
Read on here.
And here.
En francais ici.
It’s a shame he never recorded the 7th and 9th for Philips in Vienna when he did 3, 4, 5 and 8 there, which (most of the time) I find his most compelling the work (and I love all of Haitink’s Bruckner). BRSO is the closest to Vienna in its Bruckner sound, but it’s not quite there. That’s especially true for the 8th, where the Viennese Haitink seemed a bit wilder than usual, and that recording remains, to my ears, the single greatest I have ever heard. And it is bizarrely unavailable.
Haitink’s Bruckner 8 with the Vienna Phil is available to stream on Spotify, Idagio and Qobuz.
I’ve been on Qobuz for several years and have yet to see it. Weird.
http://open.qobuz.com/album/0002894705342
Well, the best entry-point is usually a live performance.
If it has to be on record, why not start with the cheeky maid, “No. 1,” so that you are in on the venture with Bruckner himself?
Jochum made a good recording of the Linz Version in Dahlem in October 1965 using Karajan’s orchestra when it was, along with the soon-to-fade London Symphony Orchestra, the most expressive and technically secure in the world.
Spot-on about Haitink and Bruckner! I was lucky enough to be present at Haitink’s last London concerts before his retirement; a magical experience.
The 7th Symphony was my first encounter with Bruckner, as a schoolboy, in a performance on the Third Programme. I was hooked for life and bought a stereo recording on Turnabout for what would now be 87.5 pence! The conductor was Hans Rosbaud. I’ve just dusted off my turntable and I am listening to it now. It still sounds wonderful without the benefit of digital sanitation – and all for the cost of less than a week’s pocket money! It made me a life-long Bruckner devotee.
Hans Rosbaud is certainly a conductor that should be
appreciated more for his greatness. In 1962 he figured
in a 6-week residency with the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra, which included a Mahler 9th. I was told the CSO players spoke of these concerts for years…..
“It is a reading that grows with repletion.” Huh? My CD library has grown to repletion. My admiration for Bruckner grows with repetition.
PS… and going off piste, NL’s mention of record stores inevitably brings to mind the re-opening of HMV in Oxford Street a few weeks ago. This used to have a massive basement full of classical recordings; one could spend a whole day browsing the thousands on offer, including loads of cut-price bargains, such as the Brilliant Classics complete Mozart and Bach boxes; the price was £40.00 each plus the risk of a hernia carrying them home. That basement dlassical section soon closed, and the classical department was relegated to a tiny area with a massively reduced selection. The store then closed its doors in 2019.
I visited the re-opened store with trepidation, which turned out to be fully justified. The classical ‘department’ is now a couple of browsers buried with in the whole CD section – only a few dozen CDs of popular works. There were quite a few people in the store but no more than before. If you go there, be sure to bring earplugs or you will be deafened by the racket of pop music.
I see that the store was bought by Douglas Putnam, who predicated his HMV acquisition on a perceived upturn in CD sales. He also owns the Canadian ‘Sunrise’ record store. If you look at their Classical selection online, it’s dismal. HMV re-opened with performances by some popular music acts. Far from this being another Sunrise, I cannot but predict that the strains of Gotterdammerung will be heard from Oxford Street within a year or two.
Luckily, any classical devotee who is disappointed with the new HMV can easily catch a Central Line train from there to Notting Hill Gate and visit the Record and Tape Exchange at no. 38. Its classical basement is jam-packed with thousands of second-hand CDs at very reasonable prices – all in pristine condition. The same could be said for Fine Records in George Street, Hove.
Rather as I feared it would be – just as the BBC’s music quiz with Paul Gambaccini has turned almost entirely to pop/theatre repertoire
If schools and the state broadcaster can’t be bothered with classical for most of the time, we can’t expect much more from a store in Oxford Street.
Foyles on Charing Cross Road has a pretty good classical section, including a separate section for contemporary music. I still miss Harold Moores and 84 Charing Cross Road.
There’s a Haitink Bruckner 7 with the Vienna Phil, via their website :
https://www.wienerphilharmoniker.at/en/shop/article/special-annual-edition-2020-haitink/32992
Somebody bought it me for Christmas so we’ll have a listen soon.
Haitink’s 1967 Bruckner 7 is my favourite but check out Yakov Kreizberg’s too (wow).
Listen to Bruckner when I was a young man… Particularly like the third and 7th… Think I’ll check out this new recording.
My first Bruckner recording was Haitink with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in the Seventh Symphony on a two-LP cut-out for 69 cents, bought in a Thrifty’s drug store. Back then, their ice cream cones were 25 cents, max. Right now, the only Haitink Bruckner in my collection is his excellent Concertgebouw Orchestra 1990s digital recording of the Ninth symphony, though I now have eight different recordings of the Seventh Symphony currently. I have fond memories of that first Bruckner recording, but I suspect another would be surplus to requirements right now. I’m surprised at how much I like the Georg Tintner recording with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra on Naxos.
We had the good fortune to hear Bernard Haitink regularly over many decades in Boston. To my ears, he was an important but inconsistent Brucknerian. The symphonies he did well, he did REALLY well (7 & 5 quickly come to mind). And the ones he didn’t do so well, well… (I’d have to Pausen to think about which ones…)
In my experience, a Haitink Bruckner performance was usually well architected and inside the music, but sometimes didn’t mine the emotional depths sufficiently. The 7th however was an exception.
In my opinion Haitink always did the 7th really well (in the one live performance I heard in Boston as well as recordings of other live performances). Haitink and the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave us a truly great performances of the 7th in 2002 (wow – 20 years ago – and I can still hear the performance in my ears). They were firing on all cylinders and it was an exceptional performance that went way over the top. That was one of Haitink’s greatest performances in Boston among the many I had the privilege to hear.
I’m an emotionless person so must suffer from some post war Sydrome such as ADHD, Autism or other modern invention or Acronym but somehow a lot of Bruckner plaintive, often brief melodies make me cry. I have some hope therefore.
I often feel jealous of my female counterparts who can seem to blub at anything.
Couldn’t agree with you more about Haitink’s Bruckner, particularly with the Concergebouworkest, whose strings produced just the right tone and weight of sound, particularly in its home acoustic. I’ve enjoyed lots of different interpretations by a variety of conductors over the years, but Haitink’s are the ones to live with. (Something quirky that might make a live performance exciting can easily become irritating over time.)
On a business trip to Berlin, I happened to walk by the Philharmonie and decided to stop in to see what was being performed and if there were tickets available. That night’s performance was Haitink conducting Bruckner’s Sixth with the Berlin Philharmonic. I got the last ticket, sitting up in balcony above the horn section.
It took me a long time to come down from that performance.
Except for his utterly gorgeous choral music (the motets), Bruckner’s orchestral output should have been promptly forgotten and never made part of the repertory. They are, in a word, BORING. Bloated, uninteresting, endless. Music better left unheard.
Aww, did little toddler not get enough attention the other day? Boo-hoo.
I only saw him live once, but it was a memorable performance of Bruckner’s 8th with the VPO.
It’s a pity Haitink slowed down so much in his performances in his last years. I watched pne of his very last performances on Sky Arts of Bruckner’s 4th symphony. It should be lively especially in the scherzo but this performance was dull and played far too slow. Made me long for Gunther Wand who speeded up in his Bruckner performances. I virtually fel asleep watching this. He was also far too slow in his last Mahler 3rd at the Proms a couple a few years ago making it overlong. I can remember his earlier performances on disc which were very good. Bruckner symphonies need to be taken at a pace otherwise they just don’t hold together. Not fast, just not too slow and ponderous. Karajan got this right.
Yes, the great maestro was a wonderful conductor of Bruckner along with Celebidache, Solti, Wand, Barenboim, Karajan…