Benjamin Zander's Bruckner
Posted: 2005-02-18 10:06:12
"I'VE NEVER HAD SO MUCH FUN!" exclaimed Benjamin Zander to the well wishers in the Jordan Hall lobby after, of all things, his performance with the Boston Philharmonic of Bruckner's monumental Eighth Symphony. "Fun" isn't how most people think of the high-serious, otherworldly Bruckner. But Zander's Bruckner was fun — in the sense that there was such delight and buoyancy (and variety) in how the orchestra responded to the complicated and sometimes unexpected way Bruckner put the pieces of this enormous work together. For the first three movements, Zander allowed the musical phrases to unfold like a force of nature: stop-action cinematography of flowers opening, continuous but also weirdly discontinuous, reeling between spiritual exhilaration and depressed yet serene soul searching. Then in the last movement, the discontinuities became more frantic. Here was Bruckner the architect of the grand design, yet also desperate to find the right holes in which to put the put his pegs, round, square, or polygonal, juxtaposing not only the themes within the movement but, like Beethoven in the Ninth Symphony, bringing back themes from all the movements and connecting them — which in the end he does — triumphantly.
Zander is a paradox. When he started conducting Mahler, nearly 30 years ago, before Mahler became his professional project, he treated the then relatively unperformed composer less as a symphonist than as a novelist, finding complex psychological subtleties in nuances of phrasing and extremes of tempo and volume. More recently, Zander's Mahler has inched closer to the center. Good, energetic performances, but the composer was beginning to sound more conventional, and more predictable. I found myself liking the music less.
I don't think of Bruckner as particularly psychological at all, yet for once I was hearing music that sounded as if it had been composed by someone obsessed and going on at great — and inspired — length in an urgent search for spiritual release. It was serious, profound, but also fun, the way Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky or Shakespearean tragedy can be fun.
The orchestra was sensational — brilliant brass work from trumpets, horns, and "Wagner tubas," timpani (Edward Meltzer), harp (Martha Moor), flute (Kathleen Boyd), and clarinet (Thomas Hill). The almost uncanny Peggy Pearson, whose oboe didn't have any extended solos, came to be the personal voice, the isolated human soul crying in the wilderness, responding to the cosmic happenings in heartbreaking lament, in poignant resignation, in quiet, glowing joy.
There were some rough edges. In the tonal blur of the slow movement, for example, it was hard to distinguish the crucial syncopated string phrase, which returns as a big brass expostulation at the end. Chicken feed. Minor glitches in a thrilling achievement. It was the old Ben Zander. Welcome back!
