I've never really got Bruckner; live performances have often left me slightly cold, perhaps even a bit bored, wondering what all the fuss was about. (Though Tom Service's recent article on the composer is an enormous help.) Not so last night, when Claudio Abbado – a wisp of a man now, frail; only his enormous eminence preventing me from mentioning how much he resembles Montgomery Burns in the Simpsons – conducted the symphony with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall in London.
The boldness of the almost inaudible, yet utterly precise pianissimos. The sheer skill of the playing, that made a phrase begun on the flute and ended on the horn come as if from the same artist's breath. And Abbado's sheer grip on the structure, in which Bruckner uses traditional forms (sonata, minuet, fugues etc) and brilliantly both grows and destabilises, undermines them. Enough of me wittering: you must simply listen again on Radio 3; this with the added bonus of Tom Service speaking in the interval. It was one of the concerts of my life.
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