BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 9 in D Minor – Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra/Carl Schuricht
HDTT HDCD188, 56:02 [avail. in several diff. formats at [www.highdeftapetransfers.com] ****:
The gifted maverick of the German school of conducting, Carl Schuricht (1880-1967), bequeathed us a strong legacy in Bruckner, and this 1962 EMI inscription (ASD LP 493) of the 1894 Ninth Symphony must rank as among his most inspired readings. Often described as a stupendous arch-form, the Ninth Symphony elicits from the VPO brass–Wagner tubas and trumpets in F–and strings an exalted urgency that breaks itself into periodic moments: statement, counterstatement, and coda, as musicologist Robert Simpson conceives it. Not only do the melodic fragments and obsessive plaints ring of hymnody and psalm, but the music wants to convey the physical interaction of music with the walls of the cathedral. The several allusions to both Beethoven’s Ninth and Bruckner’s own Seventh Symphony seem a deliberate pointing to a tradition Bruckner wishes to co-opt as his “farewell to life.” Schuricht manages not only the clarion Neapolitan punctuations that mark a spiritual ascension, but he relishes those Viennese lilts and bucolic efforts to find some pantheistic repose in the often tortured pages of the first movement. The middle of the movement presents a martial crisis, a Manichean standoff between the forces of light and dark. The various transitions in the movement Schuricht effects with a sure hand we associate with his contemporaries Furtwaengler, Walter, and Knappertsbusch. A fiery clarity informs the entire structure, colossal and temperamentally sensual in the utmost.
The Scherzo in D Minor follows the plan from Beethoven’s Ninth, the pedal point piercing and the rhythmic tattoo no less pungent. A devilish velocity and hearty counterpoint collide to create an emotional tempest that swaggers and prances in the manner of Liszt. The Trio, in an uncanny (Lisztian) modulation to F-sharp Major, exerts no less ironic menace, the woodwinds twittering and the tympani threatening just under a bucolic Arcadian surface. The da capo whirls, convulses, and spins in its folkish syncopations, an equivalent of Liszt’s dance at the village inn but now extended to cry havoc and let loose the dogs of war. The usual distinctions between Bruckner and Mahler break down, if we consider the ferocious slashing energies of this thrilling and disturbing Scherzo. Schuricht’s etching of the oboe and trumpet lines proves as voluptuous as it is manic.
The last movement Adagio might well be Bruckner’s response to spiritually-tortured elements in his beloved Wagner’s Parsifal. Chorales, dirges, and chromatically Byzantine traceries infiltrate the several mazes of this massive music, searching for some resolution to its own spiritual crises. Schuricht’s ability to maintain a paradoxically rigid elastic line while delivering degrees of nuance and emotionally graduated extremes may be his true benediction on the conductor’s art in this specialized repertory. Few recordings so viscerally reveal the enormous contradictions in Bruckner’s character; and so his populist naiveté here dissolves, and the titan behind the mask often scoffs at our feeble estimates of his marriage of Heaven and Hell.
This disc provides the perfect complement to Schuricht’s equally-inspired reading of the score from 1951 Stuttgart, offered through Music&Arts (CD-1094).
— Gary Lemco
