(program)
DECCA Records recording. Printed in Canada // Anton Bruckner (1824-1896) // Symphony No.7 in E Major (1885)
Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra conducted by Max Rudolf.
Symphony No.7
1) Allegro moderato
2) Adagio: Sehr feierlich and sehr langsam (in a very solemn and very slow manner)
3) Scherzo: Sehr schnell (Very fast)
4) Finale: Bewegt, doch nicht schnell (with movement, but not fast)
So try to be good, take care and never look down.
You're never far from the truth if the truth is all around.
Even hard is good when the heart is young
When even songs that bring you down get sung.’
‘Easy Tiger’, Thomas Dybdahl
Bruckner all his life spoke, dressed, and behaved as he had been brought up in rural Upper Austria, coming across as a quaint and awkward figure in the sophisticated world of Vienna. He wore voluminous trousers, which led a friend to ask him whether he had them made by a carpenter. He never married, despite continual attempts to find a suitable wife. Bruckner’s ideas of ‘suitable’ raised eyebrows on more than one occasion. A letter survives, written when Bruckner was forty-two, in which he proposed marriage to a girl aged seventeen, a butcher’s daughter, with whom he had fallen in love. Its combination of passionate naivety and respectful formality is touching and characteristic : ‘May I hope for you, and ask your dear parents for you hand?’ Unsurprisingly, she rejected him, as did others. “” robert philip, The Classical Music Lover’s Guide
i’ll have more to think and say about this symphony after the TSO’s performance of it next week but, in the meantime, this recording reveals a somewhat stately, impersonal confession-cum-dreamy-hymnal—stretches of academic passages spliced occasionally with colours and accents that are hopefully more believable in a live performance than in the synthetic setting of a vinyl recording. like in bruckner’s Symphony No.9, there are the same endlessly winding passages in the ˆ7th, ‘symphonic boa- constrictors’ according to johannes brahms—whose musicality was as diametrically opposed to bruckner’s as rossini did to beethoven: with less strictures, more fit to play in the background of daily life, music for ‘eating, loving, singing, digesting’ so on.
There is something immense about the way Bruckner struggles to build his great paragraphs and to pile up his enormous climaxes. It is easy to sense the depth of faith that lies behind them. And if the methods seem cruel, they are the methods of a clumsy giant, and the resulting structures are unlike anything else in music. “” robert philip, The Classical Music Lover’s Guide
there is in this symphony an unmistakable sense of worship, the orderly though nevertheless fervent piety of a composer born and buried a devout catholic. the first movement, nearly half an hour long, moves the way one would expect to move in a swimming pool filled with skim milk: everything has the translucent gloominess of an organ (the composer was also a lifelong organist) and where a build-up would otherwise be relieved by a climax, there are instead curdling phrases on oboe and flute, or some similarly intangible gesture. there are some things worth admiring though, that he was a late bloomer for one, who came to composing at forty and didn’t find real noticeable success till the age of sixty. hardly any instinct is more slow and persistent, and therefore more successful, than the slow and corrosive metabolism of the truly pious:
He attended the premiere of Tristan und Isolde in Munich in 1865, where he met Wagner. […] Three years later, he moved to Vienna, succeeding his teacher as professor of harmony and counterpoint at the Vienna Conservatory. But his attempts to establish himself as a composer were dogged by frustration. He had to wait until 1884 for a real success - the premiere of his Seventh Symphony in Leipzig, a triumph repeated in Munich and Vienna. “” robert philip, The Classical Music Lover’s Guide
one of the incidental features of religious training, especially of the devout and catholic kind, is a seemingly counterintuitive talent for a quasi-secular academicism—realized during a recent stroll though the library of Uoft’s Emmanuel College—as if the strictures of the combination of theology and philology, armchair la trappe, is an attempt to dilute the strong liquors of true religious belief, make it more sociable. similarly, my own father, a lifelong Reverend, whose formal education did not surpass the equivalent of grade three, was at one point churning out self-published books of various subjects and at an alarming rate, wherein grammatical errors are as numerous as punctuation (the apple obviously hasn’t fallen far from that tree). i think i hear the same strain in the music of bruckner, the heft of faith can be read in the insurmountable paragraphs of musical materials put forward in this symphony like complex integral equations—perhaps in an attempt to sure-up the incoherence that is always at the heart and mind of faith (of religious faith at least, a distinction Bon Iver’s justin vernon beautifully, and rightfully, makes). here’s hoping the live performance reveals what may have been lost on vinyl.
(song of the week: ‘Easy Tiger’ — Thomas Dybdahl)
There's gotta be a song left to sing
'Cause everybody can't have thought of everything
One little song that ain't been sung
One little rag that ain't been wrung out completely yet
That's got a little left
‘One Little Song’, gillian welch
that’d be the day i’m done for, when that little rag is completely rung, and can’t find one more little song to whet the appetite. though i think the world is too big for that, there’ll always be people with names like thomas dybdahl walking around—who, so-named-are left with no choice but to write the kind of folk songs that read and feel like a letter delivered just on-time. his songs have the effect of a hand-written letter, his voice indent the same words that have ‘been abused a thousand times’ with an accent of his own making. i think i can hear in his ‘A Love Story’ the opening of a door, perhaps to the forgotten room to the memory he sings about ‘the day we all got lost on the old man’s farm just trying to get across…’.
‘Easy Tiger’ is the second song on his 2013 album What’s Left is Forever, a tender and susurrous admonishment of our headlong and hazardously hurried moments. it was the first song i listened to in the new year, and with it i found another way to say ‘Wisely and Slow’, to say that whatever it is you must do—add a bit of slow to it; or that slow isn’t exactly enough, it needs a bit of wisdom as a side-constraint, sometimes the wise thing is also the headlong thing.