Review: CBSO perform Bruckner’s Eighth, at Symphony Hall, Birmingham
With Andris Nelsons succumbing to a viral infection, Simone Young, whom we will see later this season in Mussorgsky, Sibelius, Debussy and Stravinsky, came galloping over the horizon to rescue the CBSO’s planned performance of Bruckner’s massive Eighth Symphony.
The Australian conductor comes with an impressive pedigree, having built enviable reputations in Bergen, Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, as well as in her home country.
Certainly her platform-manner is authoritative, her sinuous body-language signalling every entry assiduously, coaxing expressive nuances effectively (though Sir Adrian Boult would not have approved of so much left-hand mirroring right-hand).
She drew from the CBSO a well-paced reading, Bruckner’s contrapuntal lines judiciously balanced, his textures well projected in Symphony Hall’s cathedral-like acoustic, doors to the acoustic chambers open wide.
Strings were warm and well-cushioned, woodwinds choired eloquently, horns and Wagner tubas intoned with presence.
This is Bruckner’s most exotic scoring, adding solo violin, multiple harps and enhanced percussion into the mix, and special praise should be given to the lyrical timpanism of Cliff Pick.
Praise too for the upper strings, expending so much energy in Bruckner’s stamina-sapping bowing demands.
Nothing to fault this account technically. But the interpretation left me cold.
There was no sense of desolate Alpine pilgrimage, which is the essence of Bruckner, no sense of eventual triumph.
This symphony’s concluding pages should be overwhelming in peroration.
Here there was just the feeling that we had reached the end of the score.
