Bruckner 5 (1878 Version)

Album review

With his Fifth Symphony, Bruckner smashed the glass ceiling that capped the length of major musical works at one hour: it comes in at a touch under an hour and twenty minutes, whereas even the most imposing of its predecessors generally stuck at around an hour. But the counterpoint, the intertwined themes, the digressions, developments and modulations in the direction of the furthest harmonic shores all need longer to fully unfold. The work was finished in 1878 and unlike many of his symphonies, this one wasn't re-written a hundred times: he wrote one original and definitive version, and that was that. Was this in part because Bruckner was never able to see the work performed in its orchestral version, and so it was never influenced by well-intentioned but foolish observers? He was able to hear it once in public, in an arrangement for two pianos: the orchestral version was first performed in 1894 but the composer was too ill to attend. And that's just as well, because he would surely have had a heart attack had he heard the insufferable, insolent alterations, reorchestrations, cuts and additions inflicted on the work by conductor Franz Schalk, who perhaps thought he was doing good — how wrong he was! But it's the original version that Yannnick Nézet-Séguin gives us here, at the head of the Montreal Metropolitan Orchestra, also known as the orchestra of the Opéra de Montréal, a troupe that's managed to haul itself up onto the world stage, whereas the town's other big orchestra... Well, that's another story. © SM/Qobuz