To play Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony, patiently and without frenzy, in the extended Haas edition and yet to land home and dry under the 80-minute mark is quite an achievement. This is what happens here and it has to be said that, between them, Teldec, Barenboim and the Berlin Philharmonic have provided us with what is arguably the best – certainly, the most plausible and responsible – single-CD stereo Bruckner to date. I say ‘stereo’ because Music & Arts have also managed to fit Furtwangler’s celebrated 1944 Austrian Radio recording (modified Haas) on to a single CD. Furtwangler’s is not necessarily the greatest Bruckner Eighth on record, but it is certainly the most Angst-ridden and as such it is a thing to be pondered and wondered at.
Not that the competition among latter-day single-disc Bruckner Eighths is all that strong. Tennstedt and Solti both use the foreshortened Nowak edition (as does Giulini in his epic, mid-price two-disc 1984 Vienna PO recording for DG) and both speed the work on in places. Solti, who has never really possessed either the patience or the long-term rhythmic control to be a really great Bruckner conductor, is particularly quick in the finale, disastrously so.
Barenboim now takes a slightly brisker view of the opening two movements than he did on his very fine 1980 Chicago recording. The result is an added dramatic tension in the first movement, offset by some lessening of the mood of tragic pathos in the closing bars and a less proud rhythmic carriage in the Scherzo. As for the great Adagio – Feierlich langsam, doch nicht schleppend (not dragging) – Barenboim still, by a hair’s breadth, sets a tempo that does indeed drag: drags the music down, for all his long-term mastery of what seems to be at times a barely flickering pulse.
The orchestral sonority in the slow movement is also strangely dulled. This may be deliberate – Barenboim evoking a mood of “visionary dreariness” (Wordsworth’s term) – but I suspect it has a lot to do with the rather ‘dead’ acoustic of the Berlin Philharmonie, and perhaps something to do, too, with the Berlin string playing these days. Karajan’s 1975 Berlin recording, also made in the Philharmonie, has the same slightly dulled sound at the start of the Adagio, but the tempo is not so slow, the quiet pulsing accompaniment is better defined, and Karajan encourages the first violins to play out rather more. Better still is Karajan’s 1988 Vienna version where the acoustic (the Vienna Musikverein) is cleaner and livelier and where the first violins of the Vienna Philharmonic play with an altogether more palpable sense of emotion. Robert Simpson talks of “a vague air of trouble detachment” in this theme. Barenboim, and to some extent the earlier Karajan, suggest the detachment without those more troubling overtones whose very evocation makes the Karajan/VPO version so remarkable.
The VPO/Karajan spills over on to two full-price discs (and DG offer no fill-up). But the fact is, the symphony in the Haas edition probably needs 80 minutes plus, despite Haas’s own printed estimate “etwa 78 Minuten”. In an interview in the booklet, Barenboim discusses the relative brevity of Bruckner’s allegedly ‘massive’ codas and the problem of their pacing and proportion in performance. It is, indeed, a problem; and it is interesting to find it being so thoughtfully addressed. However, comparing the new version with the VPO/Karajan account reveals the old fox giving himself what appears to be oceans of time within what is in fact a very short space indeed. At two and a half minutes, Karajan’s coda is half a minute longer than Barenboim’s and it makes all the difference. At the end, you fancy you have just encountered Everest; with Barenboim it seems a bit more like a windy walk up Helvellyn.
In the end, though, it is not the performance that would make me think twice about investing in this new Teldec one-disc ‘bargain’ so much as the often rather disappointingly dulled acoustic setting. Though the recording has its moments, most notably in the first movements, too often it seems to be playing a strange kind of ‘here I am at one remove’ game. Truth to tell, I got more vivid, readily reproducible sound from my old DG Chicago/Barenboim LPs than I did from this new disc.'