Gunther Herbig is an ideal conductor for the majestic symphonies of Anton Bruckner. Back in Taipei from his home in Michigan, Herbig will tonight conduct the National Symphony Orchestra in the Austrian master’s by turns serene, resonant, spiritual, free-ranging, but above all spacious Symphony No.8 in the National Concert Hall. It should be a memorable occasion.
Bruckner’s self-doubting, naive, but heart-on-the-sleeve approach to an orchestral form that had by the 1890s already chalked up masterpieces by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Mendelssohn and others had its mockers at first, and even today musicians can be found who admit to coming late to an admiration of the self-taught Catholic recluse. Nevertheless these expansive, rhapsodic works have attracted some of the world’s most celebrated conductors, and the Eighth is without doubt one of the greatest of them.
It was Brahms who first mockingly called them “boa-constrictor symphonies.” But this is not entirely a condemnation. They do indeed coil inexorably round you, then squeeze you, though possibly not to death, in gigantic climaxes that resemble muscular spasms. But this can be a thrilling experience, though possibly not one that the chaste Brahms, genius that he is, was entirely disposed to appreciate.
The reason Herbig is so suited to this music is that he is a Romantic at heart, and Bruckner’s symphonies are among the outlying peaks at the end of the great mountain range that was Romanticism. They may almost totter under their own weight, but their combination of nobility, lyricism and sheer ambition makes them high summits indeed.
Herbig has always been a proponent of the great 19th-century classics as opposed to their often short-lived modernist successors. But he is also an austere conductor with the power to rein in Bruckner’s tendency to prolixity and diffuseness, and shape the parts into the architecture of a titanic, visionary whole.
The Bruckner symphony, well over an hour long, occupies the second half of tonight’s program. The first half is taken up with the Toru Takemitsu’s Requiem, his first work for concert performance, written in 1957.
Takemitsu was Japan’s most famous 20th-century composer. He was enormously productive, writing the scores for 93 films (including such classics as Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes and Akira Kurosawa’s Ran) and incorporating elements from jazz and American popular music, of which he had an encyclopedic knowledge, into works that on the surface had more in common with the European avant-garde.
Much of Requiem, for string instruments only, is soaring and yearning and far from abstruse, however. A short clip can he heard on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QwZwYJe92o.
Tonight’s concert begins at 7pm, not the more usual 7.30pm. Don’t be late — if you are you can guarantee the sleek attendants at the National Concert Hall won’t let you in until the interval. Why they can’t quietly admit latecomers to the back of the upper level, as is the custom in some other auditoriums, I’ve never been able to understand.
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