Simon Rattle conducts Bruckner's Eighth

While Vladimir Jurowski impressed many, myself included, as a potential permanent music director for the Philadelphia Orchestra in his performances this March, for some, Sir Simon Rattle remains the One Who Got Away.

I don't particularly belong to the latter party, for I've heard good concerts and bad ones from Rattle. His performance of the Bruckner Eighth at this past week's concerts, however, was a highlight of the season.

It seemed all the more remarkable in that Rattle's podium style, alternately fussy and monkish, seemed often to bear only the most tangential relation to the musical proceedings. On the one hand, his fluttering fingers came so close to one violinist that I feared the poor fiddler would be distracted from his score; on the other, Rattle could stand motionless in the midst of a fortissimo climax, as if he were a mere bystander. No matter, though, for the Orchestra played for him with a precision, balance and conviction that was all one could wish.

An unconventional work

Bruckner's Eighth was, at the time of its composition in 1887, the longest symphony ever written— the Mahler Third would eventually run longer, but with seven movements to Bruckner's four. Their markings— allegro moderato, scherzo, adagio and finale— are conventional enough, but little else in the score is.

Some commentators have seen a reasonable approximation of classical symphonic structure in the Eighth, but I think the bafflement of contemporaries was nearer the mark. Bruckner nearly always provides a clearly stated idea, or two, or three, at the beginning of each of his movements, but he never offers anything that tells what he will do with this material, or anything like the usual classical distinction of exposition, development, and recapitulation.

It's rather like finding oneself in an open boat on an ocean that's pulled now this way and now that, with massive surges of sound that can materialize within a matter of bars, and as rapidly give away to the barest murmur, as if some brooding Neptune were dismissing one thought to try another. Nor is there any internal logic that suggests when the music should end; in principle, a Bruckner movement could go on forever, and when it does in fact stop, it is with a sense that time has been suspended, and is only being handed back to the listener in a spirit of condescension.

Never stoops to argument

What keeps this process interesting is Bruckner's unending fertility of invention; his motifs and the orchestral colors in which they are clothed seem inexhaustible. A Bruckner symphony never stoops to argument; it is all earnest declaration or delicate musing. With another composer— not necessarily a lesser one— moments of relative strength or weakness can be parsed. But Bruckner requires complete commitment, not to say ardor, because if anything fails the whole is in danger of collapse.

This is particularly the case with the great adagio that is the heart of the score. Perhaps Rattle's own deceptively rhapsodic style serves him well in this music, since he wisely gives it its head while remaining attentive to balances and passagework. It's hard to single out individual sections of the Orchestra in a score of this dimension, but the violins, particularly in pianissimo passages, were ravishing.

The symphony alone would have made for a longish concert by local standards, but it was preceded by Mozart's Piano Concerto # 25 in C (K. 503), a masterpiece of another stripe. The British pianist Imogen Cooper made her debut with the Orchestra, and played with great fluency and dexterity, although what seemed to me a somewhat hard tone. The music itself, with its prominent trumpets and timpani, is martially assertive for Mozart, and it got a bit of a bumpy ride. But no two composers could be more unalike than Mozart and Bruckner, and perhaps it was inevitable that one of them would get the shorter shrift in a concert that yoked them both together.