Directing bruckner

Went to see Bruckner 8 played by the BBC Phil at the Bridgewater on Saturday.  Gunter Herbig was conducting.  Unlike many, he conducts only fractionally ahead of the beat, so that there does appear to be some relationship between what he does and what the orchestra does.  There was no single point where I thought, "He got that wrong", but sometimes did feel a lack of direction in the music, a common fault in Bruckner performances, and it's interesting to think why this might be.  

Bruckner tends to write in self-contained paragraphs.  One ends and another begins.  Over time you get previous paragraphs repeated, sometimes nearly verbatim, sometimes very much altered.  Because of the huge stretches of music involved, repetition of these long paragraphs can make you feel as if you're going round in a circle.  Hearing the music after a long and busy day, there were times when I imagined myself in a dream-state; my fourteen year old son fell comprehensively asleep and his heavy breathing punctuated the silences between the movements.  

When the final chord began at (what turned out to be) the end of the last movement I found myself thinking, "This could be the end.  On the other hand he could just contrive a diminuendo and get it going again with something else".  There was no sense that this had to be the conclusion; it was almost as if Bruckner had merely had enough and thought, "Right, let's bung a bit of C major in - that'll round things off nicely".  That could be the conductor's fault, of course, but it's a feeling you rarely experience in Sibelius or Nielsen: their grip of musical argument is so masterly that you are never in any doubt that the music has got to where it's been going all along.

At the moment I'm rehearsing the Gorton Phil for a performance of Symphonie Fantastique at the end of February, and my other gripe concerned Bruckner's orchestration.  If only he had had a fraction of Berlioz's imagination!  With Bruckner it is sumptuous strings or heaven-storming brass; or both.  But his woodwind writing is pedestrian - they are reduced to the occasional cursory solo.  No wonder wind players don't tend to rate Bruckner much.  Of course one reason Mahler's symphonies are on the whole better regarded is that his writing for the orchestra is a hundred times more varied and idiomatic than Bruckner.  But then, like Berlioz, he was a conductor, and conductors understand the way an orchestra works in the way few composers can.