Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Symphony No 7 in E major, WAB 107 (1883 ed. Nowak)
Mason Bates (b.1977)
Resurrexit
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck
rec. live, 25-27 March 2022, Heinz Hall for the Performing Arts, Pittsburgh, USA
Reference Recordings FR-757SACD [78]
The current release represents Honeck and Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s third entry in what seems to be a Bruckner symphony cycle slowly in the making. Hopefully, that is indeed the case, given the exceptional results that we have seen so far from the Austrian conductor and his highly acclaimed ensemble, considered by many to be among the finest in the United States today. Honeck and the PSO’s Bruckner Symphony No 4 from 2015 (reviews here and here) and No 9 from 2019 (reviews here, here and here ) have been praised by my MWI colleagues for combining revelatory interpretations, first-class playing and exceptional sonics.
Following such immense successes, this new album has considerable hype to live up to – and it does so in spectacular fashion. Honeck and the PSO deliver a tour de force with this Bruckner Symphony No 7, served up on this recording along with Bates’ Resurrexit, a piece that they commissioned the American composer to write in celebration of Maestro Honeck’s 60th birthday in 2018. This inclusion is remarkably generous of Reference Recordings, since the two Bruckner releases so far mentioned above have yet to include any fillers, with each running just over an hour in length.
Let’s start with the sound of the orchestra, as it’s such a key determinant for the success of any Bruckner performance, given the refinement in ensemble balance and blend that the Austrian composer’s signature contrasting textures demand. Honeck has a wonderful ear for clarity, making distinctions between legato, marcato and everything along the articulation continuum utterly transparent. In the accompanying booklet to this album, the maestro continues his longstanding tradition of writing extensive notes. He provides rationales for select interpretative choices, even down to the way certain individual notes are played, supplemented by precise track timings to boot. At the start of the first movement, the long, aching theme is gorgeously phrased by the cellos with a silky smoothness that is often marred by a suboptimal balance between the winds and cellos in lesser performances (track 1, 0:09-1:21). Not so here; Honeck blends the solo horn, and later clarinets, with the cello melody superbly well. Another “Exhibit A” of this conductor’s and orchestra’s ability to conjure beautiful sonorities is at the end of the development section. There’s a Brucknerian trademark tutti passage played in fff, which requires an acute sensitivity to maintain a tone quality as exquisite as the one Honeck and the PSO achieve here (track 1, 11:30-11:57).
The second movement, Adagio, sehr feierlich und sehr langsam, continues the acoustic feast with the introduction of four Wagner tubas (two in B-flat, two in F) that contribute to an even more sumptuous orchestral tone. Honeck gives us a truly “very slow” rendition here, though one never has the feeling that the movement drags. This well-judged tempo allows phrase endings to be gently tapered off, and the highly expressive silences between phrases to be keenly observed – Brucknerian features that require judicious treatment to preserve the music’s structural integrity. The conductor’s sehr langsam also grants us the opportunity to savour the sensuous, resplendent sonority of the PSO low strings in the middle of the movement (track 2, 10:59-11:30). Throughout the Adagio, and indeed the whole symphony, Honeck and his band demonstrate how to build long crescendos with tension properly released only at its culmination. Strikingly, the climax of the movement is sonically overwhelming yet without a hint of harshness (track 2, 17:52), thanks to the round, opulent tone in which Honeck and the PSO are captured by Soundmirror’s engineers.
Honeck and the PSO prove to be impressively flexible with their sonority as well, a telltale sign of a highly refined ensemble. In the Scherzo, they’re taut and incisive, with sharp attention paid to the accents in the brass and staccatissimo in the strings. In the relatively short trio section, Bruckner called for a remarkable number of dynamic changes, from p to ff, crescendo to diminuendo, as well as hairpins of different sizes that go in both directions. These are almost without fail realized with precision and clarity by the Pittsburghers.
Rounding off the symphony is a Finale that is here truly bewegt, doch nicht schnell (moving, but not fast), a tricky indication to implement, given the abundance of double-dotted rhythms, especially in tutti passages, that require exacting ensemble work. Honeck and the PSO prove more than up to the task, finding just the right tempo that enables the flowing character of the movement while preserving an immense wealth of detail, be it rhythmic, dynamic, or timbral. It’s worth pointing out a curious, but incredibly effective trick that Honeck uses at the coda, which I’ve never heard elsewhere. In the final two bars, Honeck asks instruments with sustained notes, such as the rolling timpani and woodwinds, to drop off early so that the trumpets could proclaim their final notes without being masked by the rest of the orchestra. At that point the orchestra is unanimously playing at fff. The reverberance following the ultimate chord has an exceptional sparkle and ring to it as a result. An extraordinary finish, then, to an extraordinary rendition of the Bruckner 7th.
Bates’ Resurrexit is scored for a large orchestra with an especially wide array of percussion, including vibraphone, high triangle, nipple gong, crotales, church bells, woodblock, among other curiosities. According to Bates’ webpage (link) about the piece, he attempts to create a “biblical narrative full of mystery and the supernatural” through purely symphonic means, as opposed to the symphonic-choral methods that composers like Bach and Mahler employed in their explorations of the theme of Resurrection. As in many settings of the Resurrection “story”, as Bates put it, Resurrexit tracks a journey from darkness to light through its ten-minute span. What we also get here, though, is an eclectic smorgasbord of Middle Eastern modes, Catholic chants, traditional tonality and contemporary timbres. Honeck and the PSO do a fantastic job of showcasing the piece’s unusual instrumentation. The most interesting include the semantron, “a long plank of wood suspended by ropes, [which] is used in a variety of monasteries to summon monks to prayer at the start of a procession”, and the Catholic Bell Tree, which consists of four small bells that are suspended on a cross of wood, as noted by the composer. À propos of the celebratory occasion for which the work was written, Honeck and the PSO perform with a great deal of commitment and gratification, capping off their album in glorious triumph.
This is a truly unmissable release that combines this conductor’s and ensemble’s well-deserved accolades in high and late Romantic repertoire with a much-welcomed advocacy for contemporary orchestral music.
Kelvin Chan
Previous reviews by Ralph Moore and John Quinn
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