Track List Anton Bruckner (1824 - 1896) Symphony No.7 in E major (Ed. Nowak) 1. Allegro moderato 2. Adagio. Sehr feierlich und sehr langsam 3. Scherzo: Sehr schnell 4. Finale: Bewegt doch nicht schnell No other living musician draws on such seemingly unlimited resources as Daniel Barenboim. Not only does he enjoy a twin perspective on music – a pianist and conductor – but he also commands an enormous repertory that includes orchestral music and operas and extends from Mozart to Boulez and Elliott Carter. And he often immerses himself in these musical worlds by performing entire cycles of works: Beethoven, Wagner, Schumann, Bruckner and Mahler – under its principal conductor, the Berlin Staatskapelle has worked its way through entire libraries of music scores and in doing so earned a unique reputation among German orchestras. Behind these cycles lies not only an Olympian urge on Barenboim’s part to flex his artistic muscles but more especially a desire for knowledge and understanding. Through cyclical performances Barenboim and, in consequence, his audiences discover what motivated a composer and how he evolved from one work to the next, exploring byways, losing his way and taking up older concepts or breaking with those same ideas. Whole books can be written about such musical journeys, but it is also possible to hear them for ourselves in the form of a performance of the music itself. In June 2010 Barenboim conducted six of Bruckner’s symphonies at the Berlin Philharmonie within a single week, programming the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Symphonies alongside Beethoven’s five piano concertos, with Barenboim himself as the soloist. It was the most monumental project of the concert season, both for the musicians involved and for the audience, too. With each concert, Barenboim’s vision of Bruckner’s music became clearer, while the members of the Staatskapelle reacted more and more responsively to his instructions on the podium. The result was an extraordinarily flexible Bruckner, with fluently shifting tempi and an exceptional range of orchestral tone colours: the Staatskapelle strings produced an unusually warm and varied tone, the woodwind and horn solos were like human voices, and the brass provided a solid foundation for the orchestral sonorities, sometimes also gloriously stepping to the fore. Such organic flexibility is highly unusual. Bruckner planned the proportions of his symphonies carefully in advance, creating a sense of regularity that can be discerned by dint of his insistence on repeating entire groups of bars. An organist by training, Bruckner treats the orchestra like an organ, a body of sound that can be increased or reduced by adding or subtracting “registers” in the form of whole orchestral groups. The composer’s compulsive urge to impose a sense of order on his music has its roots in his anxious suppression of all living matter. Bruckner kept falling in love with very young women with whom a relationship was impossible from the outset. Instead, he frequented morgues and was present when the bodies of both Beethoven and Schubert were exhumed. Only with difficulty was he prevented from touching their skulls. A performer can bring out the elements of order in Bruckner’s music, but he or she can also look for what lies beneath the surface of this order. It is no accident that Barenboim’s autobiography bears the title A Life in Music: if we take it literally, it is by no means as banal as it seems at first sight. As a musician who embraces life to the full, Barenboim is the very antithesis of Bruckner, but it is precisely for this reason that he is able to bring out the suppressed aspects of the music. In the Seventh Symphony, as heard here, those aspects are not buried very deeply: the famous opening theme in the cellos is a twenty-one-bar period that does have an in inner structure but is free of the rhythmic patterns that control the playful third theme, for example. The sense of fluidity with which Barenboim invests the opening theme extends beyond the climactic second subject-group and also leaves its mark on the third, implicating it in the breathtakingly dynamic shaping of the movement as a whole, a reading that presupposes a particularly bold approach to its tempo relationships. The Adagio is a profoundly solemn movement notable not least for the fact that this was the first time that Bruckner had used Wagner tubas, forcing the music’s sound world down into depths of sepulchral blackness. Barenboim views the second subject not just as a way of creating a contrast with the first subject but also as an attempt to escape from the depressive atmosphere of the opening. Here, too, the dynamic development continues in the repeat of the sombre theme, investing it with a sense of yearning that finds peace only in the coda, Bruckner’s threnody to the dead Wagner, a composer whom he revered above all others. In this way, Barenboim is able to invest Bruckner’s structures – feared because they revel in repeats that tend towards stasis – with a feeling of psychological liquefaction. Here there are no “repeats”: the music that returns has in the meantime changed its meaning as a result of all that has come in between. Bruckner’s music is in a constant state of flux. By unleashing the vital force of this music, Barenboim smashes the marble of a false sublimity that weighs down many Bruckner performances with a sense of importance that is not always credible. And listeners can rediscover for themselves the passion and despair, the longings and the hopes of Bruckner’s music. Peter Uehling 2/2012