BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 4 in E-flat Major “Romantic” – SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg/Sylvain Cambreling – Glor Classics GC09231, 62:37 [Distr. by Qualiton] ****:
French conductors of Bruckner still remain rare in the “tradition,” so the appearance of this 22-26 September 2003 Bruckner Fourth by Sylvain Cambreling (b. 1948) comes as disarming surprise, a delightful one at that. From first to last, this performance lacks anything like stodginess in its joints. Cambreling has taken an individual approach to this Bruckner staple (1873; rev. 1881) whose first movement exercises in simultaneous duplets and triplets in periodic episodes can prove predictable. Rather, Cambreling constantly adjusts the metric tensions to produce a vivid, even unnerving, confabulation of contrapuntal melodic strands that constantly seeks some pedal-point on which it can exalt its hymn tunes. These melodies become themselves “romantic” in the pantheistic sense, equating bird calls and mountain horns with what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls “God’s Grandeur.” The SWR horn section–along with an active kettle drum–maintain the plastic tension of the movement, always girded by a sense of cosmic playfulness in Cambreling’s canny reading of this familiar score.
The elegiac march motif of the Andante quasi Allegretto, too, keeps a mischievous eye pointed at the stars, as the music intensifies with each repetition of the main theme in contrapunctus. The SWR cello and viola sections shine here; but so do the complementary choirs as they join the mounting crusade to glory. Whatever ethos Carl Maria von Weber imparted to “hunt music,” Bruckner has enlarged upon in his joyful Scherzo, touched as it is with Wagnerian fanfare effects. Cambreling loves the interior woodwind and string work with which Bruckner peppers each of the movements, and the bustle proves infectious and exciting. The approach most reminds us of the youthful conviction of Celibidache without the heaviness of intent. The hurdy-gurdy character of the trio section looks to Schubert and to Mahler at once, but colored by a wry wit that relishes every delicacy in the timbres. The finale basks in cyclic effects, grasping and developing motifs and intervals from the prior movements and creating a veritable witches’ brew of marvelous syncopated, superheated fanfares on pedal points. The perfect-fifth motif achieves an apotheosis of Roman proportions. A rural sense of religious mission results, the stretti rife with fragments of former themes and harmonic fragments. Yet Cambreling accomplishes the often heart-pounding, polyphonic brazen effects without heaviness, the thrilling ride shaped in the tradition of that other Bruckner maverick, Carl Schuricht. Vigor and magisterial repose dominate every bar, and skeptics will simply have to audition this Bruckner for themselves, perhaps finding something of a revelation in this eminently intelligent realization.
–Gary Lemco
