{"id":919,"date":"2018-01-19T18:59:56","date_gmt":"2018-01-19T23:59:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=919"},"modified":"2018-01-19T18:59:56","modified_gmt":"2018-01-19T23:59:56","slug":"exalting-bruckner-at-carnegie-hall","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2018\/01\/exalting-bruckner-at-carnegie-hall.html","title":{"rendered":"Exalting Bruckner at Carnegie Hall"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Daniele<\/a>Bruckner\u2019s symphonies are communal rites of spiritual passage. For maximum impact, they require a proper hall and appropriate congregants. In New York City, Lincoln Center\u2019s Geffen Hall \u2013 formerly Fisher Hall, and Philharmonic Hall before that — is too dry and plain for Bruckner, and the New York Philharmonic audience that habituates that troubled space is restless and irreverent. I\u2019ve heard Lincoln Center Bruckner conducted by Leonard Bernstein, Christoph Eschenbach, Kurt Masur, Riccardo Muti, and Klaus Tennstedt. None of these experiences stuck except Tennstedt\u2019s Symphony No. 8, a volcano of existential intensity. But lacking the requisite cathedral sonority.<\/p>\n

Carnegie Hall, a few blocks downtown, is ideal for Bruckner, and I\u2019ve heard a lot of it there. The conductors were Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Herbert Blomstedt, Sergiu Celibidache, Bernard Haitinck, Eugen Jochum, Masur again, Zubin Mehta, Simon Rattle, and Wolfgang Sawallisch. The performances that mattered were Celibidache in No. 4 and Jochum in No. 8. For Celibidache I smoked a joint and sat up close and I knew what I was doing \u2013 the symphony played itself in slow motion, with every detail of sonority and balance hypnotically poised. Jochum\u2019s Eighth was, by comparison, warmly human, therapeutically wholesome, rapturously beautiful.<\/p>\n

Daniele Gatti, who conducted the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Bruckner\u2019s Ninth Symphony a few nights ago at Carnegie Hall, is relatively new to me. I first heard him five seasons ago at the Metropolitan Opera, conducting Parsifal<\/em> \u2013 a performance I reviewed in the Times<\/em> Literary<\/em> Supplement<\/em> and reprinted here.<\/a> Gatti\u2019s Parsifal<\/em> was the most memorably conducted opera I\u2019ve encountered in New York in decades. His Carnegie Hall program \u2013 which began with excerpts from Parsifal<\/em> act three \u2013 confirmed that first impression.<\/p>\n

What distinguishes this conductor, so far as I can tell, is a combination of German and Italian traits that reads like a string of clich\u00e9s. German is his mastery of structure and \u2013 a related attribute \u2013 inspired access to the harmonic undertow of tension and release that grounds \u201cInnerlichkeit.\u201d The Italian part is what makes Gatti\u2019s Bruckner sui generis: a Mediterranean investment in legato and sostenuto. Long, sinuous strands of song are wedded to long-range musical architecture. With the Concertgebouw, the weight and suppleness of these sound designs were \u2013 even more than at the Met \u2013 singularly refulgent. The Gatti Bruckner 9 was distinctive, vast, exalted. A great performance.<\/p>\n

So sustained was Gatti\u2019s architectural plan that \u2013 unique in my experience of the work \u2013 he launched the second movement attacca, without so much as an exhalation of breath following the first movement\u2019s massive coda. The symphony\u2019s ending, often fashioned as a celestial appendix, was in Gatti\u2019s reading not a narrative event, but structural: the beatific halo was not distended.<\/p>\n

Bruckner\u2019s Ninth is full of pregnant silences. Gatti\u2019s were in some cases daringly prolonged, but at all times precisely calibrated to weigh a phased accretion or dissipation of pulse and intensity. In these fraught passages, the audience plays a crucial role. At Carnegie, 2,500 listeners sat silently in thrall: a welcome sign of civilization.<\/p>\n

I left the hall feeling wonderfully purged. How I wish that New York City had a conductor or orchestra of such exalted caliber.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruckner\u2019s symphonies are communal rites of spiritual passage. For maximum impact, they require a proper hall and appropriate congregants. In New York City, Lincoln Center\u2019s Geffen Hall \u2013 formerly Fisher Hall, and Philharmonic Hall before that — is too dry and plain for Bruckner, and the New York Philharmonic audience that habituates that troubled space […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-919","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-eP","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=919"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":923,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/919\/revisions\/923"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}