BRUCKNER: Symphony No. 9 in d (Nowak Edition) – Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/ Manfred Honeck – Reference Recordings Fresh! Multichannel SACD FR-733, 63:12 *****:
Ah, to live in Pittsburgh these days! No, this is not a joke, as any music lover who appreciates a great orchestra would have no trouble residing in the three-river city. In fact, it could be a sort of Nirvana. And why, you say? Because the Pittsburgh Symphony is sounding as good as any orchestra in the country, and Manfred Honeck’s direction stamps an indelible seal on so many masterworks once thought virtually untouchable. Not that he is topping all the great recordings—but he is certainly equaling many of them and knocking a few out of their venerable and venerated positions.
Take this Bruckner 9; while maybe not the most popular in the Brucknerian canon, it is certainly his greatest, and has several outstanding recordings. Honeck, long time member of the Vienna Philharmonic before taking up the baton, mentions in the notes to this release that he was once fortunate enough to play it under Leonard Bernstein. That recording, one of my favorites and certainly ranking among the best, clearly influences Honeck yet he is in no way completely swayed by it. Bernstein’s typically probing, exaggerated way with the score makes for some scintillating drama, but not many conductors are willing to put heart and emotion on sleeve like Lenny, and Honeck doesn’t either. Instead, we get a reading far more to my mind like the Giulini with the same orchestra. Yet even here, I doubt that Bernstein (a penetrating paradigm of intuitive musicianship) or Giulini (who valued smoothness of conception over all other attributes) gave half the thought that Honeck does over the singular but significant fact that the composer dedicated this symphony “to God.”
When Bruckner completed his Eighth Symphony, he immediately stared on his Ninth, in 1887. It was never to be completed, though there are 172 fully orchestrated measures in the fourth movement. But the composer wasn’t having any of it in terms of finishing—he ordered his Te Deum to be performed as the last movement though today that is rarely done. The first three movements also took quite a lot of time, and were interrupted by revisionist work on the First, Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies. And of course, Bruckner, like others before him, were haunted by the idea of the “Ninth”, that mystical, death-imbued term that has bedeviled composers ever since Beethoven. But humble, self-effacing, and pedagogically oriented as he was, he also knew the worth of his music, and this last work had much more significance in his mind.
Honeck knows this, and explores it in great detail in his notes, which in turn seamlessly translate into his interpretation. The first movement starts with a death march, yet by the end God has arrived and tempers the whole with hope. The “demonic” or “warlike” second movement seems to be the human spirit itself in conflict with the dark powers of the world, and the last movement, in an amazing exegesis by Honeck, relates to the Agnus Dei section of the Roman Mass that Bruckner so adored. The profound religiosity of the composer—so often overlooked in today’s anti-religion spectrum of critical consensus—permeates every bar of this wondrous work, and it really can’t be understood apart from it.
Honeck’s conception is neither overly-expansive or too sharply-edged. He doesn’t smooth over anything, but instead tends to focus on the traditional Brucknerian cathedral-like building blocks of sound, while paying especial attention to the exquisite melodies that weave throughout this work. He does approach this work religiously, believing that Bruckner did also, but he is not saccharine or sentimental. Instead, a balanced, dramatic, powerfully reliable attention to the score is coupled with what I would call a theological musicality. He does what he does, while trusting that Bruckner’s god will work the rest through the composer’s score. The surround sound, as usual by the folks at sound/mirror, is simply spectacular, easily the best I have heard in this work, expansive. Vibrant, and dynamically resonant.
If you love this piece, you will have to have this. Period.
—Steven Ritter
