Classical Music Review: Bambi meets Godzilla at Carnegie Hall

The Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Daniele Gatti, conductor

Carnegie Hall, Manhattan

January 17, 2018

Richard Wagner: Prelude to Act 3 and Good Friday Spell from Parsifal (1882)

Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 9 in D minor (1896)

Wednesday’s excellent concert by the peerless Amsterdam Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra paired the final music composed by two of the giants of Romanticism, Wagner and Brucker. Bruckner idolized the 10 years older Wagner, and the unfinished Ninth Symphony contains several explicit references to Wagner’s music, most obviously the ascending string figures in the Adagio that evoke the Grail Motive from Parsifal.  So this concert pairing was logical and interesting. It was particularly fun for me, since I saw this same conductor perform Parsifal complete in memorable performances at the Bayreuth Festival (2010)  and at the Metropolitan Opera (2013). Gatti works well with these big virtuosic orchestras, always maintaining forward motion and never letting the music get swallowed in plush cushions of sound, as Herbert von Karajan so often did late in his career. Both works lie in the comfort zone for this orchestra, which produced a rich, supple tone with enormous dynamic gradation and superb technical control, assisted by the Carnegie Hall acoustics.

It was fascinating to listen to orchestra music from Act 3 of Parsifal without the sets and singers, allowing one to focus on Wagner’s ability to use constant modulation to move action forward in a way unlike any other composer. This music felt like an early twentieth century work, beginning a new musical movement, not ending the last one. Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony, on the other hand, feels like a capstone of traditional romanticism. I have commented before on Bruckner’s flaws; unlike Wagner he has difficulty sustaining momentum and forward motion over a whole movement—he needs to stop things every so often to breath, relax, and perhaps have a nice glass of wine. This gives his pieces a fragmentary feeling that disrupts his characteristic long, sweeping legato lines and rich sonorities, derived from his career as an organist. Combined with his relatively less adventurous harmonies (at least compared to Wagner), and the result is a great deal of dull music, such as much of the first movement of this symphony.

Things are different with the second movement Scherzo, however. In one of his most famous movements, he alternates extreme delicacy (Bambi) with scampering pizzicato strings and flutes with a heavy pulsing, theme (Godzilla) played on all down-bows in the strings that makes you think of German tanks mowing down Belgians. Bambi introduces the movement, suddenly followed by the shocking appearance of Godzilla in D minor (as in this performance by Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, who amply evoke the Wehrmacht pounding Belgium). The middle trio section shifts shockingly to F# major and is all airiness, like Mendelssohn in the fairy-woods. It should, I think, be taken faster to provide contrast with the German tanks (Bruckner marks it “schnell” (fast), vs. “bewegt, lebhaft” (emotional, lively) in the opening part). This section reminds me of the music of Bruckner’s contemporary Tchaikovsky--listen in particular to the scampering flute, right out of The Nutcracker, published four years prior (Oswald Kabasta, Munich Philharmonic 1943).  Many conductors are too pokey in this section, perhaps trying to unify the movement, but I think that Bruckner wanted extreme contrasts instead. This was nicely achieved in this Concertgebouw performance. Oh, by the way, here is the original, classic Bambi meets Godzilla video clip---the Godzilla music sounds rather like an electronic mash of this scherzo, with all the notes superimposed in one megachord. 

Bruckner’s music often comes across as bloated and conservative, but some of this comes from his insecurities. He was a tortured fellow-- a provincial bumpkin who lived in political Vienna, an organist trying to compose for large orchestras, and a frustrated pursuer of teenage girls. The first editions of his works were often more original and daring, but later edits got toned down, pushed on the nervous man by misguided friends who wanted to make the works more accessible and sale-able. Fortuitously, the Ninth Symphony never had the chance for such revisions, since Bruckner died prior to its completion, ironically because he was spending all his time revising earlier symphonies. So we are left, especially in the Scherzo, with a more raw and emotional version of this composer, one that I wish we heard more of. Bruckner is often compared unfavorably to Gustav Mahler, but while Mahler often erred towards extroversion and “too much” in his works, Bruckner did the opposite, and this reticence in an era of exuberance has made his works seem less compelling in the eyes of most. All credit then, to Daniele Gatti and his wonderful orchestra for showing Bruckner at his best, side by side with the composer who inspired him.