This week Semyon Bychkov led the Philharmonic in Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony. I attended both the Friday and Saturday performances. Bychkov, known for deep narrative and intense performance, did not disappoint on this visit to New York.
The Eighth is among Bruckner’s greatest achievements, a symphony of judgment, praise, consolation, and final radiance. It is also one of those works where the conductor’s view of the whole must be clear and precise. The individual paragraphs are long, the climaxes often delayed, and the spiritual argument can easily become generalized if the transitions are not shaped with conviction and clarity. Bychkov, conducting the Nowak edition, took a medium-to-slow approach, broad but not stagnant. One had the sense of a full line moving through the piece, even if the individual phrases were not always shaped as masterfully as one hears from the very greatest Bruckner conductors.
On Friday I sat very close at orchestra level, where the Philharmonic’s sound washes over the listener. This is not always the most balanced position, but it is a revealing one. The most striking quality of the evening was the legato. The performance was immensely smooth, at times almost too smooth, though it never quite became smeared. The New York sound remains dark, but not in the old brash way. It is not the regal darkness of Berlin or Vienna; rather, it points downward, into the middle and lower registers, holding the sound close to the ground. This served the Bruckner well; dark works for his music, and the Philharmonic is an exceptional Bruckner orchestra.
Bychkov conducted the first movement in a moderate to slow tempo. The opening had breadth without becoming overly slow, and the string accents were highly effective against the brass. In Bruckner, the brass can easily flatten the orchestral picture, but here the strings were given enough definition to remain audible and structurally present. The movement reached something like judgment by the end, though the truly religious character of the performance did not fully emerge until later. There were moments where greater articulation would have helped. The hall itself is clear, especially compared with the former Avery Fisher/pre-renovation Geffen Hall, but even in this acoustic some details were not audible.
The Scherzo was conducted mostly in three, though Bychkov often moved into one, drawing larger shapes rather than giving every beat. The trio began fairly quickly (though not as quickly as a Maazel), then broadened into the richer passages. This was perhaps the most earthly movement of the performance: folk-like, physical, even at times rock-like in its weight and propulsion. On Saturday, this movement was more exciting, but also less stable. There were some alignment issues, and at times the front and back of the orchestra seemed to experience the tempo differently. Bychkov’s conducting style can have the quality of a sorcerer-conjurer—large motions, sweeping indications, and a desire to summon the sound rather than merely organize it. This can be thrilling, but it is not always clarifying.
The Adagio was the center of the performance. Bychkov set down the baton, clasped his hands in an explicit gesture of prayer, and began conducting with hands only. He began this way on both evenings, and the meaning was unmistakable. Whatever his personal beliefs may be, he approached the movement as religious music. This was not merely beautiful Bruckner, but prayerful Bruckner. The songfulness of the Philharmonic strings came through impressively, and the floating chorales, both in the strings and Wagner tubas, were highly effective. The orchestra’s evenness up and down the group is one of its great strengths at present; even with minor mishaps in select passages, the quality of the playing was very high.
Still, not everything in the Adagio fully landed. Some harp entrances coming out of climaxes seemed misplaced, or at least did not project clearly enough. There was also some ensemble looseness at one of the climactic points on Friday. Bychkov included the triangle and cymbals, and the climaxes were just about loud enough, though the soft passages could have been softer. In Bruckner, silence and near-silence are not decorative; they are part of the theological drama-expedition.
The Finale was stronger on Saturday, as was the performance overall. From my seat in the second tier, left side, roughly in line with Bychkov, the sound picture was clearer, though less enveloping. One could also hear the reflections in the back of the hall, which can be distracting from some seats but worked well enough from this position. The performance had overall more excitement on the second night. The Philharmonic is almost too technical at times, in the sense that the surfaces are so polished and the execution so capable that one can occasionally feel the mechanistic apparatus of the orchestra. But in the best stretches, especially in the latter half of the work, the playing moved beyond technique into something more serious, indescribable.
Bychkov’s reading was ultimately smooth, dark, and prayer-narrative driven. It was not the clearest Bruckner Eighth one could imagine, nor was every phrase shaped with the highest degree of finesse. But the performance had a genuine line, and more importantly, it had belief. Bruckner’s Eighth does not merely require volume, brass, and patience; it requires a conductor and orchestra willing to treat the music as a matter of spiritual/metaphysical consequence. Here the Philharmonic played with seriousness, depth, and a remarkable consistency of tone across a very long evening. One left grateful not only for the scale of the direct human achievement onstage, but for the rare opportunity to hear Bruckner’s message speak from the deep past and from a future not yet disclosed.