A Bounty of Bruckner Symphonies From Gunter Wand

Boxed sets of the Bruckner symphonies are hardly commonplace. The music, while no longer obscure, is not--or ever likely to be--popular enough for that. So it’s reasonable to assume that RCA’s release in this format of recordings made between 1974 and 1981 (60075, 10 CDs, mid-price) of that composer’s canonic nine is intended to boost the stock of conductor Gunter Wand, who, by approaching age 80 and being German, must of necessity be considered an heir to the mantle of (fill in name of your favorite deceased Teutonic Master).

The travel-shy Wand was a no-show for the occasion of his planned United States debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic a few seasons ago. He finally appeared this year, when the Chicago Symphony enticed him into leading some core mantle-inheritor repertory: Schubert, Brahms and Bruckner.

Of the vast Wand outpouring from RCA in recent months, the most impressive results are achieved in Bruckner, music in which incisiveness and rhythmic spring are not governing factors.

Wand’s orchestra here is one he led for over a quarter-century, the Cologne Radio Symphony, hardly a world-beater, but a solid ensemble responsive to the conductor’s wishes. And his performances with them are never less than eminently sensible.

Wand gives us Bruckner no more bombastic or thickly textured than necessary and fluid within the context of slowish (but not ponderous) tempos. He does not linger over phrases and thus resists distorting the inherently relaxed Brucknerian line. Wand does not seem to be afflicted with the revered-in-some-quarters Teutonic mysticism.

In the first two symphonies, the conductor’s dedication pays handsome dividends: Clearly, he is not doing this music simply for the sake of having a complete set.

He is never casual, thus these are more than usually detailed readings, exposing more melodic and harmonic distinction in the Second Symphony than had hitherto been suspected. Then, too, his clarifying patience makes a strong case for the Fifth Symphony, whose opening movement can in less dedicated, detail-conscious hands sound like an uncorrected, almost amateurish draft.

Best among the more familiar symphonies here is the Ninth: grandly deep and dark, yet mobile, and the best played of the lot. But with the popular Fourth and Seventh symphonies, the competition is not only numerous but more vigorous and better executed.

In No. 6, there is strong competition from Wand himself, via a recent live-performance recording (RCA 60061, full price) with the superior players of Hamburg’s Northwest German Radio Orchestra, of which Wand has been music director since leaving Cologne in 1982.

The Sixth has a particularly edgy, driving opening movement whose rhythmic insistence is unique in the composer’s output. In the RCA set, it is slackly directed and mushily recorded, while version two is a thriller: driving, intense, smashingly recorded, while the gorgeously expansive slow movement is simply better played and recorded in the recent version.

The Eighth Symphony might once have been a natural for Hans Knappertsbusch (1888-1965), one of the venerated Wagner interpreters of the century. Alas, the performance in this latest of MCA’s bargain-priced “Double Decker” 2-CD sets (9825) was recorded very shortly before his death, by which time his work had given a pathetically comical connotation to the euphemism majestic. Thus, what we have here is akin to Bruckner (and Knappertsbusch) self-caricature: impossibly slow and lumpy, with the composer’s characteristic grinding thematic shifts--gaucheries to some ears--emphasized as if they were the point of his music.

Knappertsbusch’s orchestra is the ragged, boxily recorded Munich Philharmonic, which might have produced a more coherent performance if they had ignored the conductor altogether.

The accompanying work is likewise 1960s Bruckner: an uneccentric, intelligently conceived Bruckner Seventh Symphony by William Steinberg and a roughish, enthusiastic Pittsburgh Symphony. The recorded sound is, however, unpleasant, with much extraneous noise, shrill violins and obsessive spotlighting of cellos and basses.

Orchestral execution cannot be faulted in the most recent release of the Ninth Symphony, in which the Cleveland Orchestra is under Christoph von Dohnanyi’s direction (London 425 405, full price). This is, however, Bruckner so propulsively, slickly efficient, so thoroughly demystified in tone, mood and texture as to give the impression of an interpretation steeped not only in the wrong style but the wrong century.