Bruckner: Symphony No. 7; Mason Bates: Resurrexit
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra/Manfred Honeck
Reference Recordings FR-757SACD 77:02 mins
Clip: Bruckner: Symphony No. 7 in E Major – III. Sehr schnell
Manfred Honeck has already released Bruckner’s Fourth and Ninth symphonies with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, to widespread acclaim.
This new Seventh ups the ante further: it’s undoubtedly one of the best recordings of the symphony in the digital era.
The Pittsburgh cellos exude a wonderfully reassuring confidence in the expansive opening theme, and the violins display a similar savoir-faire on taking it over a page later.
This is an orchestra by now deeply acculturated to the Austrian conductor’s essentially old-school style of Bruckner interpretation, with warmly blended tones and a meticulously gradated approach to the music’s architecture.
The Adagio is beautifully paced, much of its eloquence deriving from the forensic detail Honeck bakes into dynamics and accentuation, without obtrusive fussiness.
The long ascent towards the movement’s principal peroration is made in masterly fashion, and Honeck thrillingly includes the cymbal crash at its summit. The four Wagner tubas in the coda are ideally dignified and sonorous.
Follow that, as they say. And Honeck does, in a bristling account of the Scherzo with bounding folk-dance rhythms and shards of birdsong jagging sharply through the textures.
Bruckner adored the natural world, and Honeck mentions in his detailed booklet essay the proliferation of bird sounds woven into the fabric of the movement.
Bruckner as musical ornithologist, half a century before Messiaen? Honeck suggests as much, in the sharp rusticity of the woodwind playing in his interpretation.
The Finale launches with purposeful alacrity, the violin theme sporting an almost Mozartian joie de vivre, echoed athletically in the lower string responses a few bars later.
So often in performances of the Seventh what comes after the Adagio seems curiously anticlimactic, as though its sombre meditations make afterthoughts superfluous.
Not here – in Honeck’s view both the Scherzo and Finale are bracingly consequential, and the symphony ends with an almost jaunty optimism and a brilliantly flaring contribution from the excellent Pittsburgh brass section.
Unusually there is a coupling, Resurrexit, an 11-minute piece by American composer Mason Bates.
Commissioned to mark Honeck’s 60th birthday and performed alongside Bruckner’s Seventh at concerts in Pittsburgh in March 2022, it’s exotically scored, punchily expressive and well worth hearing.
Based on the Christian Easter narrative, the piece requires a phalanx of extra percussion instruments, including the semantron (a large wooden plank hammered by mallets).
The flavour is Middle Eastern, with swirling woodwind ululations and scatter-gun brass fanfares at the exultant conclusion.
It’s a more than interesting makeweight, but the Seventh is what most listeners will go to this album for, and they will not be disappointed.
It’s a glowing testament to the high levels of synergy and mutual comprehension that Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony have achieved in his 16 years as music director, particularly in Bruckner.
The live recording of both works is excellent, catching both the power and splendour of the Pittsburgh
playing, not to mention its manifold subtleties of tone and inflection. Terry Blain