Photo taken at yesterday’s rehearsal
Thursday, November 13, 2025
Großer Saal, Elbphilharmonie, Platz der Deutschen Einheit 1, 20457 Hamburg, Germany
Bruckner Nine has been sustaining Herbert Blomstedt recently (if not included on his recent three-week, six-concert trip to Tokyo) and here it was once more as a singular (if unfinished) offering. It would have been asking too much for this NDR performance to equal the exceptional one given in Leipzig towards the end of September when things happened above and beyond preparation. In Hamburg maybe different things happened – there was an immediate sense of a perilous journey being undertaken, one that Bruckner wouldn’t live to complete. On this occasion Blomstedt subtly held on to phrases without compromising the first movement’s structure, the players instinctively blending and intertwining, detail expressively highlighted, the brass sonorous in tuttis; above all, a supreme understanding hung in the air of where the music is going, and, at any one point, why it is where it is and where it has been. The first movement, possibly a little more time-taken than hitherto if with never a sense of the whole fracturing, arrived gloriously at its first pitstop, the silent welcome short-lived as the Scherzo’s gawky rhythms were violently introduced, uncompromising attack (terrific timpani contributions in terms of timbre, accuracy and presence) with a Trio of macabre quickness; and then the third movement – at once the intended Adagio and unintended Finale – had a burden of expectation and farewell that was truth-tellingly compelling. It’s invidious if pertinent to single out the intense oboe contributions, the strings’ lachrymose responses, and fortissimos that seemed to open the Gates of Heaven for one of its own, entrance assured once the painful climax and the ensuing ‘where next?’ measures had been experienced. The long silence that followed said it all, a gentle “bravo” bringing us back to Planet Earth and cueing collective cheers (I wonder why the German-speaking announcer mentioned Celibidache). The sixty-three minutes had been absorbing on their personal and perceptive terms, with no suspicion of ennui. On this coming Sunday morning, the 16th, starting at eleven-o’clock, the NDR musicians and Blomstedt will do it again, freshly divined no doubt and, contrary to the score’s fate, life-enhancing.