Bruckner looms large in the final stretch of this year’s Proms, with Daniel Barenboim and Christian Thielemann at the helm next week in three of his middle-period symphonies. But this Bruckner mini-festival started at the end, with an outstanding account of the uncompleted ninth symphony by the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchester, under the baton of the music director of the Paris Opera, Philippe Jordan.
Jordan flies under the radar in the UK by comparison with next week’s superstars. But his account of the ninth symphony was out of the Brucknerian top drawer. It had exemplary clarity of texture – important with Bruckner’s complex harmonies – eschewed unwritten meaningful pauses and built inexorably across the three extant movements. Perhaps the opening movement could have been given a little more room to breathe, but by the time Jordan reached the grinding orchestral discords near the end of the slow movement – which were followed, as written, with an immensely meaningful pause – the more potent for its singularity, this performance had found its own persuasively authentic way to lay bare the doubts and struggles that underlie so much of Bruckner.
It was daring to pair Bach’s intimate Cantata No 82 Ich Habe Genug with Bruckner’s rich orchestral panorama. But there was inner logic too, because both are three-part works of solitary believers, one a northern Lutheran, the other a southern Catholic, contemplating death. That the coupling succeeded was in no small way a tribute to the baritone Christian Gerhaher, whose vocal artistry manages to draw a listener in as few others, even in a space as large as the Albert Hall, and to the eloquent restraint Jordan and his players achieved, with Bernhard Heinrichs giving a fine account of the oboe obbligato.
