January 18 & 20, 2024
Atlanta Symphony Hall, Woodruff Arts Center
Atlanta, Georgia – USA
Nathalie Stutzmann, conductor; Christina Nilsson, soprano; Marina Viotti, mezzo-soprano; James Ley, tenor; Adam Lau, bass.
Anton BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 9 in D minor
Anton BRUCKNER: Te deum
Mark Gresham | 22 JAN 2024
Celebrating anniversaries has long held significance for human culture, honoring society’s achievements, progress, and resilience. Especially the observance of anniversaries that end with a pair of zeros, such as centennials and bicentennials, provides an opportunity for collective remembrance and appreciation of the past and coming together to acknowledge their shared heritage and enduring values that have shaped their identity over time, fostering a connection between past, present, and future generations. Often, anniversary celebrations are of civic or historical events or the establishment of a building or an institution; just as often, they acknowledge, to a greater or lesser extent, the birth or death of some individual of either major or minor importance.
Such is the case this week and next, when the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra celebrates the bicentennial birth year of Austrian composer and organist Anton Bruckner, recognized primarily for his symphonies and sacred music; in particular, the symphonies are symbolic of the final phase of Austro-German Romanticism, with their exploratory harmonic language, pronounced polyphonic nature, and substantial duration. His later works especially foreshadowed a contemporary musical radicalism yet to come while also modeled on the past, with the composer finding inspiration in the music of Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven, and Schubert.
Thursday night’s performance by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, led by music director Nathalie Stutzmann, was the first of the orchestra’s two-week celebration of its Architect of the Spirit: Bruckner@200 Festival.
It was not the first time the ASO had paired Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor with his Te Deum. They previously performed the same program exactly seven years to the day before Thursday night’s concert. In that instance, it was with Sir Donald Runnicles conducting, and there was an intermission. This time, with Stutzmann, there was no intermission, resulting in a performance of nearly 90 minutes without a break. But there is a supposed reason behind that.
The Symphony No. 9 was Bruckner’s last symphony. He worked on composing it starting in 1887, but the final movement remained incomplete when he died in 1896.
The first three movements of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony premiered in 1903 at Grosse Musikvereinssaal in Vienna, conducted by Ferdinand Löwe. Löwe, however, had significantly altered Bruckner’s original score by changing orchestration and harmony to align with Wagnerian ideals. It was mistakenly considered authentic until 1931, when musicologist Robert Haas highlighted the glaring differences between it and Bruckner’s manuscripts. The actual premiere of Bruckner’s original took place the following year in Munich in a concert of both versions led by conductor Siegmund von Hausegger.
Bruckner’s extant manuscripts for a final fourth movement make clear his intent was not to conclude the symphony with the “Adagio” third movement. Various endeavors have been made to craft a fourth movement based on them.
However, anonymous sources claim that Bruckner is supposed to have suggested using his Te Deum as the finale of the Ninth Symphony. That seems more apocryphal than not. Nevertheless, it is done, as evidenced by this week’s concerts without intermission. At least the January 2017 ASO performances led by Runnicles acknowledged that the Ninth Symphony and the Te Deum are de facto different works by placing an intermission between them (which also did not require the ASO Chorus and vocal soloists to remain onstage for the over an hour duration of the Symphony’s three extensive movements.
Nevertheless, Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9 is typically performed with only the three extant movements. Such was the case when the ASO performed it in 2004, again with Runnicles at the helm, but paired Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with pianist Radu Lupu as soloist for the first part of the program. Although absent a fourth movement, the Symphony seamlessly forms a compelling slow-fast-slow arching structure, even if the pace of unfolding the outer movements demands a degree of patience from the audience.
Overall, the Ninth Symphony is dark in demeanor. The faster Scherzo movement in the middle also feels menacing in its outer sections, with the Trio exhibits more varied temperaments. One might wish to compare with Beethoven’s symphonies, which served Bruckner as a reference for formal considerations. Bruckner’s symphonies are, of course, more massive in scope, but also apparent are differences in style and energy: Beethoven’s fortes pack a punch to the solar plexus, whereas Bruckner’s are like being engulfed by rising and falling ocean waves.
When the focus of a conductor’s interpretation focuses on the latter and its subjective drama, which seemed to be the case with Stutzmann on Thursday night, we can easily miss some of the more remarkable inner workings of the music. (In the quest for that revelation, one might yearn for the approach of another French conductor, the late Pierre Boulez, adopting a lean and stripped-down but monumental demeanor, cleansing away the aged varnish and revealing the authentic art hidden beneath it, as he notoriously did with Wagner’s Ring Cycle.)
Stutzman took long pauses between the movements of the Ninth Symphony, and after a curiously abrupt ending to the “Adagio” third movement, another (and perhaps deserved) long pause before launching into the Te Deum in C major as if a tagged-on final movement to the preceding Symphony (which is in D minor).
Composed between 1881 and 1884 for a mixed chorus, a quartet of soloists, organ ad libitum, and a somewhat smaller orchestra than the Ninth Symphony (eight fewer woodwinds and brass), I was not convinced by this performance that the Te Deum and the Ninth are “of the same cloth” as one online promotional text suggested.
Once again, as she has in other concerts, Stutzmann placed the vocal soloists in the unenviable position of singing in front of the choir but behind the orchestra, and in this case, directly behind the full line of contrabass in one of her reconfigurations of seating the orchestral forces. This does not benefit the soloists nor the listeners in the audience in Symphony Hall, although it might be more viable (and pragmatic) in, say, the architectural context of a resonant cathedral. The soloists (in this performance: soprano Christina Nilsson, mezzo-soprano Marina Viotti, tenor James Ley, and bass Adam Lau) would have been more easily heard collectively in front of the orchestra and been able to sing with greater ease of vocal production.
As it was (and as can seen when examining both the G. Schirmer and C.F. Peters vocal scores), the solo vocal quartet of soloists had some fine parts to deliver (when they could be heard, such as the few unaccompanied passages like the brief ensemble for Nilsson, Viotti, and Ley in measures 36 to 42 of the first movement) as well as the chorus (also at their best in the work’s occasional a cappella measures).
But if recollection serves me well, I enjoyed and preferred the performance under Runnicles seven years ago, as Stutzmann’s approach leans far more toward dependence upon bombast and bluster. While this Te Deum is certainly not among my top favorites of choral-orchestral works, Bruckner does deserve better than that. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Atlanta Symphony Orchestra: aso.org
- Nathalie Stutzmann: nathaliestutzmann.com
- ASO Chorus: aso.org/about-the-aso/conductors-musicians/aso-chorus
Read more by Mark Gresham.
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