Subscription Concerts 2023-2024Program A
[Canceled]No. 1992 Subscription (Program A)

Music history is long on anecdotes about child prodigies. Bruckner, however, was a late bloomer. Born near Linz in Upper Austria, he made a living as a schoolteacher and church organist before moving to Vienna in 1868 in his mid-forties. It is only from that moment that most of his representative works including Symphonies No. 2 to No. 9 were penned. He had to long put up with cold treatment of his symphonies until the 1884 successful premiere of No. 7 spread his fame widely, twelve years before he passed away in Vienna at age 72.
Constant and inventive harmonic change, massive sound, frequent general (long) pauses evoking a cathedral’s long reverberation, fine command of counterpoint (polyphony) – these qualities making Bruckner’s symphonies extraordinary have to do with the fact that he was an unequaled organ virtuoso (namely an excellent improviser). As for No. 5, he wrote it from 1875 to 1878. As he never revised it after, the situation is much simpler than his other symphonies’ with many different versions and editions mostly owing to his frequent large and small modifications. A main reason for that is that Bruckner never heard No. 5 performed by orchestra. He couldn’t even assist its long-awaited 1894 premiere due to illness which would kill him two years later. For this concert, his pupil Franz Schalk radically changed the orchestration and made numerous cuts to conduct it. Only this unfaithful version was known to public for years, before the International Bruckner Society published the critical editions (based on Bruckner’s manuscripts) by Robert Haas in 1935 and Leopold Nowak in 1951 (which have no significant differences). For today’s performance, Herbert Blomstedt and the orchestra will use the Nowak edition.
Bruckner used in No. 5 a tuba for the first time (prior to the revised version of No. 4), which gives gravity to the sound despite the comparatively compact instrumentation. The global coherence of this monumental work is ensured by the careful design. The outer movements both in B-flat major share the same beginning (pizzicato by cellos and contrabasses in pianissimo). The inner movements both in D minor start with the common string melody with pizzicato triplets. The third movement in A–B–A form has a scherzo (A) in sonata form, of which the cheerful second theme like “Ländler” (Austrian rural dance) reappears in the last movement. This finale gives flashbacks of the previous movements (as with Beethoven’s Ninth) at the slow introduction, followed by a startling amalgam of the sonata form and two fugues. As soon as the exposition starts, the strings powerfully give the first fugue on the first sonata theme. Then, after the brass blows abruptly a new chorale-like element to end the exposition, comes the “double” fugue on this chorale-like element and the first fugue’s theme (that is, the first sonata theme). This grand fugal movement shows the true worth of Bruckner particularly as a supreme master of counterpoint.

[Kumiko Nishi]