Saturday, December 14, 2024
Berliner Philharmonie, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, Berlin
The right sort of expectancy and intensity was evident from the opening bars to launch an imposing yet directional account of No.8, the first movement as emotionally urgent as it was intimately secretive, climaxes reached organically, brass and timpani sonorous, woodwinds leading the listener elsewhere (Wenzel Fuchs’s clarinet cameos a delight), refulgent strings cossetting big-hearted melody, and the clock stopped to the second in the final bars, followed by a whirlwind Scherzo (horn-calls like locomotive hooters) and an in-tempo Trio (which introduces harps, the three that Bruckner requests “if possible”). The Adagio was sublime – spacious, solemn and sacred – daringly hushed in reverence, poised all the way to the percussion-capped summit-arrival and also following it. The Finale opened with a burst of brass energy (good timpani thwacks, too) and strode purposefully although Andris Nelsons couldn’t resist sectionalising, however understandable, yet there was a palpable sense of coming-together in the impressive coda to end this eighty-minute incident-packed performance.