Anton Bruckner (1824-1896)
Symphony No 7 in E Major (ed. Paul Hawkshaw, 2023)
ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra/Markus Poschner
rec. 2023, Großer Saal, Radiokulturhaus, Konzerthaus, Vienna
Capriccio C8091 [59]

As part of my preparation for writing this review, I cast my mind back to my first encounters with the symphonies of Anton Bruckner. Indeed, thanks to the rather eclectic tastes of my local library, the first thing by him I ever heard was his Third Symphony in Haitink’s still commendable first recording with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Clearly this must have bowled me over, since it was soon followed-up with the Fourth with Böhm and the Vienna Philharmonic, the Fifth with Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, then the Seventh with the Dresden Staatskapelle under Eugen Jochum, all recordings that stand up remarkably well against the competition today. Since that first encounter with the Seventh all those years ago, I have listened to many other recordings of the work, most of which have been decent (for example, Solti’s with the Chicago Symphony), occasionally surprising (Toscanini and the NBC Symphony – not an interpreter I had been expecting) and sometimes extremely good (most recently, Manfred Honeck’s with the Pittsburgh Symphony). Rarely have I come across a bad one – although my own list of notorious offenders includes Colin Davis, whose attempt at addressing the ‘problem’ of a work that starts with two slow movements and finishes with two fast ones, was to switch around the Adagio and Scherzo, a decision that remains as knuckleheaded today as it was in the late 1980’s when the conductor became the first – and last – to conduct it this way. Sergiu Celibidache’s solution was instead to perform the two opening movements as slowly as humanly possible, before reverting to ‘normal’ speeds in the final two movements. It is an interpretation that can be both seen and heard in his (in)famous live recording with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra from 1992, where the closing bars of the Adagio lumber to a close at roughly the same time as virtually every other conductor is preparing for the start of the coda to the final movement, a gross exercise in egocentricity. In more recent times, Christian Thielemann’s live recording with the Vienna Philharmonic merely suffers from terminal dullness. Then there is the present recording under consideration.

Between 2021 and 2024, Markus Poschner attempted to record all the various versions of all the Bruckner symphonies, an endeavour my MWI colleague, Roy Westbrook, aptly summed up as “doomed to failure”, pointing out that the whole project comprised only eighteen versions of the symphonies including two of the First Symphony, whereas William Carragan’s near-definitive book Anton Bruckner: Eleven Symphonies; A Guide to the Versions (Absolute Publishing 2020 – review), lists three. Fortunately, there is only one version of the Seventh Symphony in this edition, as the editor, Paul Hawkshaw, has declared definitively that Bruckner fully intended the climax of the Adagio to include triangle, cymbals and timpani, a decision that delights me since I always prefer ‘full-fat’ Bruckner and have always regretted the omission of the percussion in otherwise superb recordings of this symphony by Bruno Walter and the Columbia Symphony, and Kurt Sanderling with the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Given his immersion in Bruckner’s music over so short a time, you would have thought that Poschner would be a consistent guide on the podium, but in reality he has proved to be hugely erratic throughout the cycle; whether this was due to his using the revised scores of the New Anton Bruckner Complete Works or imposing his own interpretive views on the music, I could not say – but I suspect the latter. In this recording of the Seventh, the result is tempos (with a couple of significant exceptions) that could be described as ‘fluid’ – which is fine, but I am more troubled by the microscopic attention to phrasing that too often draws attention to itself and, ironically, impedes the music’s flow, giving a ‘choppy’ impression. A good example of this is the opening of the Adagio when, after the sonorous introduction by the Wagner tubas, the string melody that follows is broken up by the conductor, rather than being allowed to soar and take wing. Further on at the same movement’s climax, the phrasing of the timpani is, to put it mildly, unusual – but whether this is Nowak’s, Haas’s, Hawkshaw’s, or even Poschner’s instruction, I could not tell you – which rather sums up the futility of trying to establish a ‘definitive score’ with Bruckner. What I can tell you is that Simon Rattle did the same thing as long ago as 1997, with his first recording of the symphony with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, when he used the Nowak edition of the score, yet all the other conductors already mentioned in this review who also use Nowak – Jochum, Solti, Honeck – phrase the same passage differently and with far more simplicity, with the result that this climax to the whole symphony blazes with greater fire in their hands than here. In all fairness, I do have to acknowledge that the Scherzo responds rather well to Poschner’s nervy and fluent momentum; however, it is the outer movements that give even greater cause for concern.

In particular, whoever thought it was Bruckner’s intention to have the coda of the first movement played as one continuous, manic accelerando, really should be banned from ever peering into a score by Bruckner again, making Franz Schalk’s meddling in Bruckner’s music seem wholly innocent by comparison. Perhaps the aim was to create the maximum contrast with the last movement which recycles some of the same material, for at this point Poschner is inclined to give the reappearance of that music maximum weight and gravitas, tipping the whole thing into bombast. It all adds up to a spectacular failure, elevating this recording to the exalted levels of Otto Klemperer’s Mahler Seventh and Leonard Bernstein’s late Deutsche Grammophon recording of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, where the results must be heard to be believed. Put more prosaically, this recording is quite possibly the worst Bruckner Seventh I have ever heard. 

This is a pity since the Capriccio label does the whole endeavour proud: the sound is very good, if not as spectacular as achieved by Reference Recordings for Manfred Honeck’s account; there are notes on Bruckner, the symphony and the edition in both German and English, the whole thing presented in a standard compact disc plastic case, with an unnecessary (and surely environmentally wasteful) cardboard slipcase. The orchestra plays very well and if the brass has a tendency to blare, I am inclined to blame this on the podium. Experienced Brucknerians may still wish to hear this release, for you won’t hear Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony performed in a manner close to this anywhere else again – but other, less hardy souls, would be advised to steer well clear.

Lee Denham

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Previous review: Ralph Moore (May 2024)