Simon Rattle gets first crack at new Bruckner Edition
mainFour years in the making, the first volume of a cleaned-up Bruckner edition was presented today.
Rattle and Berlin won premiere rights, performing the 7th symphony in Milan on May 2 and Vienna the following night. Vienna Phil won’t be pleased.
The ANTON BRUCKNER URTEXT GESAMTAUSGABE (ABUGA) is published by Bruckner Edition Wien, an imprint of Verlagsgruppe Hermann Wien, since 2015. The patron is Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the Editorial Director Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs, the Publishing Manager Alexander Herrmann. This newly conceived, scholarly-practical complete edition (45 vols.) presents a fundamentally revised division into scorings and genres. Parallel with the editions of the musical works will appear a series of text publications on Bruckner, that provides contextual information.
Great news about the new edition but, really guys, ABUGA?
Beats BUGA.
It makes perfect sense for BPO/Rattle to do the first performance since the same team have also recorded the reconstructed version Bruckner’s 9th symphony including the finale. Benjamin-Gunnar Cohrs is one of the authors of this (IMHO excellent) reconstruction.
I think the VPO have a pretty good record on Bruckner and need not worry too much about their credentials yet …
Besides, another official Bruckner complete edition is under the patronage of the Vienna Philharmonic: the “Neue Bruckner Gesamtausgabe”, published by the International Bruckner Society and the Austrian National Library.
http://www.mwv.at/
http://www.mwv.at/TextBruckner/BruckStart/BruckStart.htm
Since when has Rattle known what to do with a Bruckner symphony?
Are there any major textual problems with the 7th in any case? For a Bruckner symphony it’s remarkably free from such problems as far as I am aware. The disputed cymbal clash in the second movement being the single point of contention but someone might like to correct that view if it’s wrong.
My understanding is that there are issues concerning tempo indications, and scoring at points other than the cymbal/triangle moment in the second movement.
Even before you get to the wind entry, for example, there is a question about whether or not the horn should come in a beat early, and then it continues…
==Since when has Rattle known what to do with a Bruckner symphony?
Please don’t feed the trolls !
All known earlier editions of the Seventh failed, since they don´t make clear which information has been taken from the autograph score, whichfrom the first print edition or other sources.
The Bruckner Complete Edition scores represent
a) an attempt of Robert Haas to “reconstruct” an initial version of the autograph which was never intended by Bruckner to be published as such;
b) a correction of the Haas Edition by Nowak which creates further confusion by including misleading changes of time signature in the principal movement, but leaving crucial text problems unsolved;
c) a correction of Nowak´s correction by Rüdiger Bornhöft (2003) which re-establishes some Haas ideas and adds further unnecessary editorial details.
Revisiting the original sources, none of these editions is fully reliable.
It was high time for a proper Urtext edition.
And I think Rattle´s Bruckner Nine is, in all, one of the most convincing readings of the work, except perhaps only for the Adagio, which I prefer in the brisk reading of Carl Schuricht.