Bruckner - Symphony No. 9 - Harnoncourt (With The Documentation of The Finale Fragment) 20022SACDs - DDD - 71'40, 58'54
BMG 2003
This very interesting and worthwhile disc offers an excellent reason to acquire yet another Bruckner Ninth. As usual, Harnoncourt offers a "concept", and as with his recent Smetana Ma Vlast, this one works extremely well. First, he presents a lecture concert (a synopsis of his remarks is translated into English in the booklet) consisting of all the music for the finale that Bruckner actually put into performable shape. This strikes me as a much better solution than to play one of the conjectural completions, none of which makes a very convincing case for this movement. Apparently pages were removed from the composer's manuscript after his death by the nefarious Schalk brothers (or some equally dastardly culprit) and given away as souvenirs. Even today some are coming to light, so if you have any loose papers in your attic or basement and any of your relatives was hanging around Vienna around the turn of the last century, take a close look before you toss them out.
Then comes the main item: the symphony itself in the form of yet another "new critical edition" that sounds identical in all significant ways to what we have heard before. It's Harnoncourt who makes all the difference. This is the most savage performance since Jochum's Dresden recording, and we all know how wonderful that one is. There are moments in the first movement and scherzo where it sounds as though Bruckner was writing a sort of proto-Austrian Rite of Spring. Tempos are generally swift, the playing outstanding. In the first movement Harnoncourt is particularly adept at "getting" from one place to the next. All of those typically Brucknerian passages consisting of sequences repeated millions of times leading, say, from the mysterious opening gestures to the big unison tune, or from there to the songful second subject, never outstay their welcome. The impression of inexorable forward momentum never flags, not even during the long lead back to the recapitulation, and the first movement coda sounds terrifying, as if etched in stone. --Classics Today : [10/11/2003] David Hurwitz
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