The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
City Halls, Glasgow
Nicknamed the Apocalyptic, Bruckner’s 8th is a mighty work, unremitting in its solemn grandeur and consciousness of death. Confronted by respected colleagues who could not play it, Bruckner revised it in 1890 to be shorter, but also darker. Shorter is of course relative - the BBC SSO’s masterly performance tonight was just short of 80 minutes, and for all the brilliance of orchestra and conductor, it was undoubtedly dark - as indeed Bruckner intended. Stephen Johnson’s programme notes quote Bruckner saying of the low key ending to the first movement ‘This is Death’s Clock, that ticks for everyone, and never stops ticking till all is past.’ If there is consolation, it is hard to find - some relatively peaceful, even gentle, acceptance, as in the beautiful use of the harp in Scherzo, but little that impressed itself as enlightenment. This Symphony has been controversial since its first performance. Brahms disliked it and at least one respected critic left before the end. Yet it had enthusiastic supporters then, as it clearly has now, people who see it as a glorious cathartic exercise in confronting terror and darkness. We benefited tonight from Donald Runnicles’ skilful control of the orchestra and the reliable musicianship of the BBC SSO, but if a test of this work is that it creates a phenomenological experience of Bruckner’s vision of death, then I have to confess that for me at least it fell somewhat short.
If Bruckner is bleak the other piece on the programme is painful. Dutilleux’ Correspondances for soprano and orchestra (2002-4) is set around three letters, or epistolary poems, from Prithwindra Mukherjee, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Vincent Van Gogh, interspersed with two short poems by Rainer Maria Rilke. The tone is set by Mukherjee’s Cosmic Dance, brilliantly sung by the soprano Carolyn Sampson, whose tone evokes nothing so clearly as a scream of anguish in the face of fire. No less painful, if not so viscerally, there follows Solzhenitsin’s apology and thanks to Rostropovich and his wife Galina Vishnevskaya for their support during his years of imprisonment and exile, acknowledging the ‘cruel price’ both paid for their support. ‘One can only derive strength from the knowledge that in our time we Russians are fated to a common doom...’
There is little respite in Van Gogh’s potentially kinder vision ‘unfortunately alongside the sun of the Good Lord there is, three quarters of the time, the Devil Mistral...In my painting Cafe de Nuit I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime. So I have tried - by contrasting soft pink with blood-red and wine-red with yellow-greens and harsh blue-greens, all in an atmosphere of a devil’s furnace of pale sulphur - to express the powers of darkness in a cafe-bar.’ Perhaps the greatest consolation and the best commentary on this music lies in Rainer Maria Rilke’s short line ‘A diffused noise, a corrupted silence, everything around us, transformed into a thousand noises, leaves us and returns: a strange meeting with the infinite tide.’ Carolyn Sampson’s singing is vividly expressive, and there are moments of delight in the orchestration, but the overall impression of this concert is of pain and suffering, and it demands a touch of masochism in its audience. It was nonetheless received with delight by the Glasgow audience!
