Bruckner was notoriously uncertain about some of his own symphonies. Perhaps that partly explains why these works can withstand such very different approaches. A month ago, the 92-year-old Stanislaw Skrowaczewski conducted a monumentally spacious Bruckner Fifth in this hall, full of vast paragraphs. Now here was Andris Nelsons, more than 50 years younger, pushing, shaping and at times driving the Eighth Symphony organically onwards. The two approaches inhabit different worlds.
Nelsons is a classic podium fidget, visibly and audibly attentive to phrasing and dynamics. In the abstract, this detailed way of doing things might seem too exhausting for Bruckner’s 70-minute span. Yet Nelsons has a sense of architecture, too. His changes of pace felt idiomatic, always part of the larger picture, and he gets the obsessive, uncertain and unresolved nature of Bruckner’s writing.
The opening movement never lost momentum in spite of some breathtakingly effective quiet playing by the Philharmonia in moments of stillness. The scherzo was admirably lithe rather than bombastic, the trio particularly eloquent. The adagio pushed forward where others always hold back, but the control was unfailing, the playing eloquent and the falling away at the close mesmerising as ever. The finale, quicker than you often hear it, felt rather generalised, the argument sacrificed in favour of effect.
Although Bruckner was the centrepiece, the evening began with a performance by Håkan Hardenberger of Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s scintillating 1954 Trumpet Concerto. The concerto combines a rigorous exploration of the musical intervals of the spiritual Nobody Knows de Trouble I See (after which the concerto is named) and a freewheeling incorporation of jazz and be-bop, with saxophones, electric guitar and Hammond organ added to the orchestra.
Throughout, though, it was Hardenberger’s trumpet playing that held the attention, both for its virtuosity and the loneliness of the dying phrases which, emotionally at least, prepared the way for the Bruckner.
