Friday, March 21, 2025
De Doelen, Rotterdam
Angel Blue soared and seduced her way through Strauss’s farewell to vocal composition while also showing admirable restraint, the Rotterdam Philharmonic and Yannick Nézet-Séguin (a former music director) offering a complementary thoughtful if expressively detailed backcloth – fine horn and violin solos – with ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ (Hermann Hesse) being especially eloquent and poignant.
A short first half, a much longer second (seventy minutes) with the earliest known score of Bruckner Three (as edited by Leopold Nowak), his ‘Wagner’ Symphony (embracing quotations from his hero’s music, if later removed on request), a sprawling opus that Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdammers explored with distinction and appreciation, its highways and byways, as well as the structural cracks, with no attempt made to paper over them, rightly so. The first movement, judiciously paced for rhythmic clarity and the integration of lyrical ideas (affectionately shaped), as well as symphonic development, had a feeling of rightness throughout, climaxes organic and sonorous, pauses and tangents made significant, persuasively sustaining twenty-five minutes. The Adagio (with hints of Tristan) was wonderfully soulful, with string-playing of wondrous beauty, depth of feeling and variegation of tone (violins antiphonal, basses behind the firsts and centre-left cellos), Nézet-Séguin sustaining a spacious tempo without blinking for eighteen minutes, followed by a Scherzo (not rushed but rollicking) and related Trio that danced affably, a compact interlude before the sizeable Finale, fiery if flawed, allowed to be itself without apology, going to unexpected places as well ending somewhat curtly, suggesting arrival as being a goal even if how it is achieved is considered as being more important: start-stop, change direction.
This magnificent performance (relayed in top-range audio-visual) confirmed the opinion of the late William Carragan (another Bruckner editor) that when there are multiple versions of a Bruckner Symphony, the first one is often the best. Judging from the way the Rotterdam members played, and the enthusiasm of the home-crowd’s reception, Yannick Nézet-Séguin was a very welcome returnee, and he had a big bouquet and a hug for one of the bassists, whom I assume was retiring.