This is my 300th post on this blog. Interesting, and appropriate, that it should coincide with my review of a landmark concert in my music-loving career. Definitely not just any Toronto Symphony concert -- this one included a musical work and an artist that have both been on my must-hear bucket list for just shy of half a century.
The resulting performance was longer than many -- almost two and a half hours -- but it was absolutely worth every minute.
The first work was Mozart's irrepressibly cheerful Piano Concerto # 12 in A Major, K.414. Again, not just another Mozart performance. The soloist was Leon Fleisher. This man is a living legend, nothing less. He made his Toronto Symphony Orchestra debut in March of 1955. I was less than a year old at the time; in a month I will hit my 64th birthday. Fleisher is 90 years old this year, still teaching, still touring, still performing. Nor is this remarkable feat simply one of longevity. If you are not familiar with his story, google it and prepare to be truly astounded at what he has accomplished and overcome through his lifetime.
My first acquaintance with Fleisher's artistry goes back to my high school days, when I listened to library recordings of his performances in the Beethoven and Brahms piano concerti, recorded under George Szell with the Cleveland Orchestra -- and I still have the CD transfer of the Brahms works in my collection. I wore out my copies of the LPs.
In an easy and comfortable partnership, Fleisher and music director Peter Oundjian gave the concerto a sparkling, jovial performance which would have put a smile on almost anyone's face. The pared-down orchestra avoided the kind of heavily upholstered "Mozart sound" which I might have heard as a youngster, and Fleisher's playing similarly remained light, with no super-Beethoven heroics. The melodies of the slow movement sang with genuine flow, and the rondo finale danced us lightly away.
With a performance like this, the applause and cheers (considerable) inevitably stand as a merited tribute to the soloist's entire remarkable career as much as to the performance just given.
The much larger second work became something of a contradiction. Although I have known and loved the monumental Eighth Symphony of Anton Bruckner right back to my teenage years, and was tremendously excited to hear it -- at long last -- performed live, I had never heard the work sounding like this before. No one has ever heard the symphony like this in Canada.
At this point, I beg leave to diverge into a brief music history lesson. All my life, I have read about musicians and conductors lining up in favour of either the Robert Haas edition or the Leopold Nowak edition of the Eighth Symphony. (I lined up too -- Nowak for me). Before 1972, all live performances and all recordings of the work were in one of these two editions or in the first published version of 1892). But both are performing editions of the second version of the symphony, the version completed in 1890. Only in 1972 did Nowak also publish a performing edition of the notably different original or first version of 1887. Bruckner was stimulated into making extensive revisions of the symphony after it was rejected by the conductor Hermann Levi (a man whom Bruckner had called his "father in art" after Levi's triumphant performance of Bruckner's Seventh).
This week's concerts marked the first-ever performance in Canada of a new performing edition, prepared for the Austrian National Library by Professor Paul Hawkshaw, of the original 1887 version. Unlike Nowak's 1887 score, this one is based as much as possible on Bruckner's original autograph scores of the work (Nowak used a copyist's work as the basis for his 1887 edition). Hawkshaw's edition clears up dozens, perhaps hundreds, of small errors found in Nowak's 1887 score, and in the process brings us closer than we have ever been before to hearing the symphony as Bruckner originally created it. Hawkshaw's edition was premiered by the Yale Symphony Orchestra, under Oundjian's direction, in October of 2017.
Enough of that musicological detail. Suffice it to say that hearing this original version of the work becomes, in many spots, like hearing a completely different symphony altogether. Perhaps the two should be re-numbered as "8a" and "8b," or something of that kind, so great are the differences.
I'm still of two minds as to whether the original is in fact a "better" work than the later revision, as Oundjian plainly averred in his programme note. I'd have to hear it more often to make up my mind on that point. What does not differ between the two versions is the clear feeling that Bruckner was engaged in erecting a soaring, gigantic cathedral in sound to the greater glory of God. What was absolutely unmistakable in this concert was conductor Oundjian's thorough familiarity with and absorption into Bruckner's unique and challenging sound world.
Not the least issue for a conductor is balancing the sound of an orchestra which is so often called upon to respond like Bruckner's beloved pipe organ -- the woodwinds, or brasses, or strings entering en masse in the same way that an organist will engage different stops on the instrument. Of course, it is the brass who are most likely to overwhelm their colleagues with the full power of three trumpets, four horns, four Wagner tubas (which double as horns 5-8 in the finale), three trombones, and bass tuba. For the most part this remained a non-issue as Oundjian spurred his large string sections to greater and greater efforts with their endless fury of tremolando passages remaining quite adequately audible in even the mightiest climaxes.
The biggest single requirement for a good Bruckner performance is to give the music all the time it needs to unfold properly. Nowhere is this more critical than in the slow movement of this work, and Oundjian did not fail his audience there. In a genuine adagio tempo the music was free to breathe and grow, naturally, organically (no pun intended), from the quiet, almost hesitant beginnings to the multiple flowerings of the chorale-like strings underpinned by the arpeggios of 3 harps. This original version of the movement, by the way, includes five or six of those moments of heavenly peace where the 1890 version retains only three. In as fine a performance as this, it's easy to feel that time has somehow become suspended as the music slowly flows by you.
What, then, could form a greater contrast than the near-savage militaristic uproar in the opening pages of the finale, galloping strings and blazing brass fanfares united in a celebration of majestic triumph. Equally powerful, and equally clear-cut, was the resplendent conclusion where the themes and characteristic rhythms of all four movements are piled up together in the closing pages.
It was a long wait from the early 1970s to 2018 to at last hear this symphony performed live, but when the opportunity came it was definitely a feast for the ears that was worth waiting for.
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