Page 240 - Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Coverage Book 2023-24

Mark Elder conducting the Halle in Gateshead CREDIT: Tynesight Photographic

Big Bruckner Weekend/Glasshouse, Gateshead ★★★★☆

A weekend celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, the devout, humble
but quietly stubborn Austrian symphonist could only be big. The symphonies are immense, full of
a grandeur suggesting forests, mountains and starry skies as much as cathedrals – the clichéd and
limiting comparison Bruckner is always saddled with.

To do him justice the Glasshouse (the renamed Sage Gateshead) brought together no fewer than
four orchestras, two choirs, and soloists to perform the final three symphonies, the finest of his
several settings of the Catholic Mass, several unaccompanied choral motets and his solitary
chamber work, the String Quintet. It was a risky venture. Bruckner wasn’t interestingly neurotic
and “modern” like Gustav Mahler, the other great composer of huge symphonies. He wasn’t one of
us.

And yet the hall was packed for the rarely-heard Mass in F minor, which launched the middle day
of the festival. The German violinist conductor Thomas Zehetmair returned to lead the orchestra
he once directed, the Royal Northern Sinfonia, plus the orchestra’s own Chorus, Durham
University Choral Society, and four soloists who instead of dominating the event at the front were
tucked away behind the orchestra. It was a shrewd move, as it made their voices seem movingly
distant and almost humble – a quality heightened by their tenderly rapt performances in the
Benedictus, especially from American tenor James Ley.

At the other end of the scale were the shouts of praise in the Credo, and later an angular, thrillingly
weird fugue. Bruckner’s naivety made him run with interestingly awkward ideas a more sensible
composer would have binned, and it gives his music a recklessly joyous quality, well caught in this
unbuttoned performance.

That piece was like a series of grand but eccentrically shaped peaks. In Bruckner’s Eighth
Symphony, composed almost 20 years later in 1878, the peaks seemed loftier and smoother. It was
performed by one of the three visiting orchestras, the Hallé, now in its final months with Mark
Elder as director. It would be going too far to say it felt valedictory, but it certainly had that quality