Bruckner's Symphony No 6
A powerful, beautifully conceived Bruckner Sixth from Sir Roger
The Gramophone Choice
Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra / Sir Roger Norrington
Hänssler Classic CD93 219 (52’ · DDD). Recorded live 2007. Buy from Amazon
Bruckner’s Sixth has always been the most elusive of the composer’s mature symphonies. Treat it ‘as a kind of music we have never heard before’, wrote an admiring Donald Tovey in 1935. But few have. Only that grand old iconoclast Otto Klemperer, and now Sir Roger, have had the courage to recognise the piece as an epic off-the-wall revel.
Not that Norrington downplays the symphony’s moments of introspection. No symphony, not even Beethoven’s revel in A, can be a total knees-up. Norrington is aware where the outer movement song-subjects and their attendant harmonic adventures are going to land us. Even more than Klemperer (see below), he takes the main themes of these movements at quite a lick (the finale especially so, at some cost to orchestral equanimity in the lyric countersubject), though as with Klemperer the pulse of the lyric subjects remains proportionate. Where Norrington is fearless is in Bruckner’s on-the-spot shifts of tempo or key. But then, he has always rather relished the shock of the obvious.
It is difficult to outsmart Klemperer in the Adagio since he too divides his fiddles and deploys minimal vibrato. He is also a touch quicker than Norrington and has a more keenly recorded first oboe. That said, Norrington generates real tension in the harmonically indeterminate climax before the recapitulation. And Norrington’s is the more gamesome third movement, the down-beats in the Scherzo’s plodding string ostinato cheekily accented. With its rustic vigour and devil-may-care insouciance, this is a performance that really does tell it as it is.
Additional Recommendation
New Philharmonia Orchestra / Otto Klemperer
EMI 562621-2 (80' · ADD). Buy from Amazon
Klemperer’s performance is masterly from first note to last. It is a performance by turns lofty, tender and serene, but it is, above all, a structurally cogent performance and, within the compass of its steady-treading tempi, an intensely exciting one. (The Great Recordings of the Century coupling also contains music by Gluck and Humperdinck.)
