Vienna’s Masterful Bruckner

The Vienna Philharmonic does not show concern about its, or music’s, future. It may be willing, from time to time, to try something new--which for it means tackling a Stravinsky symphony conducted by Pierre Boulez or peeling away a layer or two of accumulated performance tradition in standard repertory with the help of a period instrument specialist such as Nikolaus Harnoncourt. Last spring, the Viennese orchestra even took the extraordinary measure of playing a solemn memorial performance under Simon Rattle on the site of a concentration camp and publicly acknowledged its culpability in the Nazi cause during World War II.

But for all that, this exceptional orchestra regards its tradition, its direct lineage to many of the greatest composers and conductors of all time, as a supreme, untarnished glory.

Thus some of us outside that traditional mind-set might enter a Vienna Philharmonic concert consumed by our own issues. For instance, we count women players. As the musicians walked on stage at Segerstrom Hall on Monday night, for the first of the orchestra’s three programs under Bernard Haitink at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, I spotted a couple of female violists; the two harpists, one of each gender; I didn’t get a clear look at the wind players.

There wasn’t, however, much time to count or ponder. The orchestra does not tune up on stage, and the program consisted of a single work, Bruckner’s monumental Eighth Symphony, and--serious occasion that it was-- it commenced nearly on the appointed hour, like a funeral or wedding. From its first notes, the orchestra made Bruckner all that mattered.

Bruckner’s symphonies are revelations that emerge from mysteriousness. The Eighth edges into life with a single pitch in the horns and violins, the stirrings of a theme emerging from the lower strings. Within a few bars, there are brass fanfares, luminous wind chords, an irresistible striding melody in the strings, and a sensation of something momentous happening.

The character of that sensation Monday was hard to pinpoint. It had to do with the unique combination of power and beauty that is the Viennese sound. It had to do with Bruckner’s supreme confidence that, however much we suffer, God is good. It had to with an orchestra that is supremely certain of the rightness of what it is playing at the moment it is playing it.

Bruckner’s Eighth has been called the zenith of symphonic literature. And it is. The last symphony the Austrian composer completed and his grandest musical statement, it was also, in the 1880s, the largest major symphonic work yet conceived by any composer. Symphonies as large, or even larger, would be written afterward, especially by Mahler, but none with Bruckner’s trusting in the purity of the form.

The Eighth is huge. In a slow performance, as this one was, its Adagio movement alone can last close to half an hour. And it isn’t all dutiful affirmation. Often harmonically vague, the music wanders, pierced by outbursts of angst. The Adagio sings the blues on a mammoth scale. In the thundering Finale, the glimpses of heaven, in a small visionary moment near the end of the exposition and again in the recapitulation, are fleeting and seem, at first, to come out of nowhere, unsupported.

Yet there is a grand plan. Themes are moldable and interlock. The peroration of the symphony is not a triumphant resolution, however loud and thunderous and glorious are those final pages of the score, but rather a culmination of all that has come before. Beethoven overcame obstacles in his symphonies. Bruckner accepted them. The magnificent cadence at the end comes from the church not the concert hall.

The performance of the Eighth on Monday night was a great one. The symphony is special to these musicians, and they won’t play it for conductors who don’t understand that. Two of the orchestra’s latest recordings are of the Eighth. One is a historic re-release of a 1957 live performance by Herbert von Karajan, who conducted it often with the orchestra, including at the end of his life when he was in particular need of spiritual balm. Another is a recent performance by Boulez; it was his first encounter with Bruckner, and for it, he went to the source.

Haitink is an experienced Brucknerian. He conducted and recorded all the symphonies in the 1970s and 1980s, when he was music director of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam. Those recordings are beautifully played, expertly controlled but without much character. His interpretation Monday was even more stately, but here the Dutch conductor brought a new urgency. He showed that he knew everything the Viennese players could do, and he encouraged them to be expressive within small details, but never lost the large picture.

The result, ironically for an orchestra more bound to music history than any other, was a performance in which time and history seemed to vanish. Bruckner’s chromatic harmonies, pungent counterpoint and massed blocks became a sound world onto themselves, lived for the moment. Every section--strings, brass, winds, percussion--sounded wondrous on its own. The horns were to die for. Yet all blended into a sonic whole far greater than the sum of its luscious parts.

The Vienna Philharmonic is not a blameless or blemishless organism, but it cannot play as it did on Monday without a heart and a soul.

The Vienna Philharmonic performs a program of Brahms, Haydn and Strauss tonight, 8 p.m., Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa, $34-$109, (949) 553-2422.