Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 8 DVD

Listening to Bruckner’s monumental Eighth Symphony, here running some 88 minutes, is like scaling Everest. The summit doesn’t come into sight until well into the third, slow movement, then it’s not until the third approach via other vistas that we arrive with a clash of cymbals at the peak. En route there are diversions into Alpine meadows where it’s not too fanciful to suggest an Edelweiss is in flower. Zubin Mehta recorded Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony early on in his career but neither his name nor that of this orchestra has been much associated with the Austrian composer.... It was therefore something of a gamble for ArtHaus to release this 1987 performance. Mehta pleads and cajoles his orchestra to give of their all, but ultimately the demands of the music and the unsympathetic acoustic of the Alte Oper Frankfurt defeat them. The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at key moments isn’t always playing as one in a symphony where there are so many entries that require a unison response. One senses that the conductor’s forward pacing of the music takes its toll on the precision within the huge waves of sound Bruckner launches throughout the work. Anxiety brings with it the wrong sort of tension, so that when the music drops into one of the pastoral episodes there’s little sense that we’ve moved into gentler terrain despite the heroic efforts of the principal flautist to add a scenic diversion. --Adrian Edwards [show more]

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