I'VE already had my tax-free festival rave-up at something fabulous.
But this is the last day of the fest, so I am going to exercise the belligerence of old age and have another one. Why? Because on Thursday night I was comprehensively blown away by one of the greatest performances of Bruckner's Fourth Symphony, The Romantic, that it has been my thrill to hear.
The context for that is that I don't like Bruckner Four. More, I don't actually care for Bruckner at all: I hate the cathedral-building in the performance of his symphonies. I can't stand the religiosity of it all. And I loathe the stop-go, start again, build it up, pause it, go back one and do it all again but louder process that makes his symphonies too long and elephantine in their progress and momentum. On a black day, I feel that nothing Bruckner said in an hour couldn't be said effectively in 15 minutes. Bruckner: a composer in need of a good editor.
So what was so different here? Two things. First the conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, one of the greats, a dynamo, who produced an amazing reading of the symphony, free of architectural baggage and without a whiff of incense: just plain, electric symphonic drama. And second, the great Philharmonia, a glitz-free band and a phenomenal ensemble with meat on its bones and humanity in its soul, which played the symphony with electrifying detail, depth and sonority.
Before Bruckner, Viviane Hagner played a gleaming account of Unsuk Chin's beautiful Violin Concerto, with its delicious atmospherics and its warm, Bergian references through the use of open strings.
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