The BBC Singers and the Berliner Philharmoniker in motets and the Fifth Symphony Anton Bruckner was first and foremost a man of God.
Much of what he composed was defined by a deep spiritualism, his symphonies and sacred music inextricably intertwined by this. The simplicity of the man stands in stark contrast to the enormous complexity of his output; if there is a monastic, almost ascetic Catholicism on a personal level, the monumental and elemental scale of what he composed touches the metaphysical. This Prom linked the two sides of Bruckner – the sacred and symphonic – and rather neatly the beginning and end of those two elements: his first written work was a motet, his last, the incomplete Ninth Symphony.
He wrote motets over a period of almost sixty years – from his time in St. Florian, Linz and Vienna – and the greatest of these motets, three of which began this Berliner Philharmoniker concert, have clear parallels with the symphonies; if you may have wondered this wasn’t the case then think again.
The three motets in this concert were composed between 1869 and 1884 – and Bruckner wrote his Fifth Symphony in 1875/76, revising it two years later. Christus factus est, the latest of the three motets, arguably has some parallels with that greatest of holy operas, Parsifal. The work is compact but it is remarkable for what it achieves within such a limited amount of time. Dynamic contrast is of the broadest hews, although it needs a group of singers who are good enough to shade their voices in either piano or pianissimo and know the acoustic will get this right. For the BBC Singers the Albert Hall became a cathedral, and that balance was knife-edge perfect. But Christus factus est is also a study in Brucknerian scale at the other end of spectrum. Beyond the tonal blend of purity, it’s an ecstatic embrace of power that links to the closure of the Fifth Symphony – even with both works recalling the Dresden Amen (itself quoted in Parsifal). The BBC Singers made the climax as devastating, and as emotionally wrenching as any I have heard.
On paper at least Locus iste may well have been the most difficult of the motets to pull off in this particular hall simply because it usually needs the open spaces of a cathedral to make the most of the silence between the lines. On a cooler evening the BBC Singers might have sounded different near the final phrase (I think they may well have done in the empty hall during rehearsals) but there was a certain mellowness here which was perhaps not ideal. Having said that, the emotion they brought to this motet was undeniable; the unity of ensemble realised with real dramatic effect. Os justi, the one motet here to have been written just after the Fifth Symphony in 1876, is the most richly harmonic of the three, the expansively high range of the BBC Singers’ voices reaching high into the dome of the hall. The BBC Singers were never less than pure toned, the range of colours they achieved little short of astonishing. Owain Park conducted what at times amounted to a sacred symphony; these were often more than the small-scale Latin texts they can often sound like. Rather, this was a performance that stripped down the aphoristic and upped the majesty and ecstasy of this music as a prelude to a symphony that would be one of Bruckner’s most monumental in scale.
I have, I’m afraid, not always enjoyed the sound of Berliner Philharmoniker under Kirill Petrenko. If there is a particular reason for this it has largely to do with a certain ‘tubbiness’ in their sound; I have often found the strings so muddy many details in a score elsewhere in the orchestra are swamped or buried by them. This was not the case here, fortunately – although Petrenko largely avoided the ‘wedding cake’ layout of the orchestra that is common at the Proms which is to pile the orchestra as high as you can so the brass end up with vertigo; with the strings mostly without risers and violins divided antiphonally this ended up as a Bruckner Fifth with quite some detail, even if it was not one of the profoundest of performances.
Nobility and monumentality in this composer need not come with huge breadth of tempo so if there was rather more Karajan than Thielemann to this Bruckner Fifth it worked in its favour. In some ways this symphony is like the Ninth: a conductor begins the Fifth knowing how he is going to get to the fourth movement’s coda with its giant chorale, one of the great symphonic endings. In no Bruckner symphony is the arc more important, the momentum of the symphony more transformative.
If silence is a quintessential element to the opening of the Fifth (linking back to the Locus iste motet) so too is its massive blocks of sound with a firestorm of brass and eruption of timpani; here Petrenko clearly knew how to use the resources of the Albert Hall acoustic so it became the vast cathedral that Bruckner surely had in mind. Adagio this music maybe, but Petrenko took it with fluidity. It’s a mark of this orchestra’s quality that the playing was able to reach heights of gorgeous tonal range: the solemnity in the horns when the movement travels into the key of D minor; string pizzicato that had the tentativeness of breath to it. Climaxes could be ferocious, but the tuttis were stormy and powerful not just muscular exercises in volume.
The quiet pizzicati of the second movement Adagio were gorgeous, the oboe solo a moment of diaphanous beauty – it can sometimes just sound, well dull. But this is a movement where the inner details need to come through, where the rhythms need to fall into place. Petrenko was swifter than most; on the other hand, you don’t need twenty minutes either and he was well off this and the flow was enough for the harmony to register, the tension to be there, and the discipline in the playing for the arc to move with a single line. There was no hanging around in the Scherzo either, although perhaps this rather bleak movement might have worked with a slightly more ascetic tone than we got here (again, the Berliner’s plump sound doesn’t always sound as if they have quite the grittiness for the terrain of a cathedral acoustic).
The final movement is colossal – I sometimes think Bruckner’s finest piece of symphonic of writing – and there’s no question that it was gloriously done here. Petrenko can often be an understated conductor, closer to Karajan than Rattle in both substance and style, but that understatement in no sense implied here an unwillingness to let the Berliners off the leash. Both the cellos and basses could be pugnacious, boxing for supremacy, against brass that were hardly restrained themselves. But what beauties emerged from the playing of the horn and woodwind together, for example; it was laden with the kind of detail and colour that perhaps only this orchestra could bring to Bruckner. Time and time again we got counterpoint of breathtaking quality. And that coda? It seemed entirely organic, the summation of all its themes into one great chorale – and what blazing intensity it was driven at.
Inspired programming, and inspired performances. For a couple of hours one felt just a little less atheist than usual.
Marc Bridle
Anton Bruckner: Os justi; Locus iste; Christus factus est; Symphony No.5 in B-flat
BBC Singers; Owain Park – conductor; Berliner Philharmoniker; Kirill Petrenko – conductorRoyal Albert Hall, London, 1 September 2024. Photos: BBC/Chris Christodoulou