Audition: Bruckner - Symphony No 9 - Staatskaplle Dresden/Jochum EMI

Preface to the completion of the 2025 Brucknerthon

In my musical world there are some pieces of music that I listen to very rarely because the music is too potent.  Today I need to finish my Brucknerthon for 2025. This mini marathon is to hear all 9 of Bruckner symphonies in order in performances/recordings that are new to me. The Ninth always looms large - last in the list, it is possibly Bruckner's most unsettling score - an uncomfortable audition.

There’s a problem at the end of each Brucknerthon, the piece I’m listening to for this review.  Bruckner’s Ninth is fierce, radical, uncompromising and literally without an ending (the finale was planned but never completed. Bruckner couldn’t end it, so it’s without a final movement.  But he left us enough to show his direction - a direction picked up by Mahler no less.

The EMI set was recording before the days of CDs, so with the original tapes transferred to high resolution SACDs in Japan - the sound is extraordinary. 

The conductor, Eugen Jochum, was one of the greatest masters of Bruckner’s unfathomable scores especially their pacing and architecture. There’s something Jochum's transitions between the great blocks of sound, which suits Bruckner but also pervades his Brahms and some of his Beethoven. Perhaps his work in the opera house helped, he brigades instrumental groups expertly without faltering, using subtle tweaking on tone, speed and expression like a director putting together an opera. 

Thankfully the sound is magnificent. Most of the credit for that can go to the venerable orchestra but it is quite clear that the more literal and somewhat static conductors don’t get as much out of this symphony as Jochum does.

Every time I come back to this symphony I am reminded of how it seems to be in a different space to any of its predecessors.  But you'd have to go to the music of Berg and Schönberg to find similarly abstracted, contorted and in some ways aggressive mood.  It might be claimed to be in that small group of 19th Century edifices; in Gothic symphonic form.  It is eerie, uncompromising and unremitting.  It feels like a forest that has been ravaged by fire - all that is left is smoke and ashes. 

Audition: Bruckner - Symphony No 9 - Staatskapalle Dresden/Jochum EMI

Score: Nowak 

Media: This audition was on disc was recorded in the Lukaskiche, Dresden. 13-16 1978 issued in Japan by Warner and Tower Records in 2017.  The SACD I used for the audition was purchased from Japan.

We know the opening so well, the trembling strings and the haunting low horns - both devices used extensively in the work.  And without much time elapsing (and time is liquid in this symphony) we come to the first large loud climax at letter C in the score. 

The sparse empty bars punctuated with woodwind and quiet strings make for a contrasting mood. When the moderato starts we feel more of a growing complexity and drama. Jochum is literal here and not forceful but, Bruckner's music is so often unsettling it's not easy to relax into its main stream.  By fig. J the sparseness and our feeling of trepidation is easily conjured by the magician. And within these opening bars you can feel Jochum's feeling for Bruckner is more flexible than some, especially in terms of tempo, instrumental balance and timbre.

This symphony is built, like many traditional symphonies, on rhythmical mottos which are transformed and multiplied to affect a feeling of remembrance even when the music is new. Jochum is particularly keen to emphasise but not over-emphasise, every change and its subsequent role in the drama.  One good thing is that he keeps the whole thing brisk where he can. There are points were the trumpets sound bit edgy but on the whole this is a very plush and rich orchestral sound.

At letter M, Jochum summons a quite bright tone but the music is also quite brisk and this yields an element of spontaneity.  This freshness is something that is missing in approaches to by many modern conductors who drive the monumental too hard and too long.  Not least, I suspect, because it’s hard to do. Jochum spent a lifetime grading and finessing these transitions and it shows. As the music strikes forward the tempi change and the drama increases at bar 400. The orchestra is in full flight - revealing the density and variety in tone and the punchy relentlessness of the rhythms. These moving and static parts start to accumulate to the second part of the movement.  It's a miracle of imagination to create such a mesmeric series of patterns which appeal so much of the ear. I’ve always felt that this first movement sets up the third movement in a quite complex way, without a fourth movement we don't know the balance of energy and cumulative repetition.  I feel the first movement is creating a drama through complexity and the third movement, (accidentally as it turned out), distills into simplicity in a way that poses more questions about the trajectory of the last unfinished movement. The listener is engaged by these oppositions but lacks the final apotheosis.

Between these two movements we have a brutal scherzo and trio which when I was younger I found exhilarating and powerful but as I have grown older I regard it as haunted, sinister and somewhat reptilian.

In the Scherzo Jochum gives us a lesson in emphasis and even at Letter A the full strings, brass and some of the percussion are given. The unanimity could blow your doors off their hinges. On first hearing in my youth I thought there was an element of humour here what with the interesting rigidity and declamatory repetition. And yet Jochum finds ways to inject subtle changes of speed and inflexion which give the music more life.  They hit home. I think Bruckner sees it as less a series of hammer blows and more a lesson in minute adjustment degrading a rock background. The Dresden brass make full use of their power and corporate density: that is to say a full clear tone. I don’t think I’ve ever heard a recording which captures so many of the instruments in this busy movement. And surprisingly there are points where the conductor seems to be a little bit manic but this I think is Bruckner's fault.

The Trio is swift under Jochum and the orchestra respond very well to this, though it requires some more elastic shaping of some of the figures. It’s as though the music is bouncing off the page like rain off a pavement.  Just before D letter the orchestra seem a bit calmed but that is a contrast I can live with.  I'm also OK with Jochum's risk taking especially for example he produces a sweet outcome for the trumpets at letter H.  

I’ve always thought the Adagio of the Symphony is just utterly tragic but somehow Jochum manages to convince me it’s somewhat sentimental and sad.  It’s marvellous that Jochum can make beautiful music in the movement.  As it proceeds you feel the kinship with his approach to the Trio especially persuading the brass to dampen.  Just after B the brass seems quite thin but the conductor's treatment of the rest of the orchestra is delicious and quite contrast to the first movement.

But I can’t tell whether, at figure 40, the brass are purposefully weak at the conductors request or exhausted or maybe holding fire at letter C. When the music slows considerably Jochum turns into a solemn procession even here we hear details pulled out for example when the bassoon takes the centre. In the lead up to the repeat of the first subject in this movement Jochum is quite mellow and quiet but as we moved to letter E we have the security of music that we’ve heard before. How beautifully Jochum shapes phrases and keeps things sharp and firm in some instances he's martial but in the next page he’s lighter and more mobile. This is the kind of Bruckner that his generation heard from Furtwangler and famously in this piece Bruno Walter.  At figure 120 the attack in the forte fortissimo is devastating.

As we come to the towering end of the piece, the conductor creates a fabulous frisson, there is so much tension here. Again we must remind ourselves this was not supposed to be an ending. The pizzacati at letter N are amazing pierce the soundscape and growing mystery.  When the strings return with fast figures against slower notes in the woodwind we feel the sense of a great coda being delivered inadvertently.  The coda then lapses into a series of repetitive figures in winds, percussion and strings with just bassoon and trumpets and timpani accentuating the jeopardy.  An almost hopeless situation seems to be ahead of us. This combined with a swelling dynamics creates a terrifying menace. The coda of this movement is made so much more effective by Jochum's simple treatment of a failed or dying symphony.  The brass on the final page make all the difference now. 

Make no mistake this is a most formidable symphony to bring off well and this recording in glorious recorded sound is perhaps its most formidable realisation on record. The benefits of higher resolution of the already very good EMI recording makes for a sobering and for some an ultimately consoling experience.  Others regard this as the most desolate ending in symphonic music - Jochum writes this large.