Anton Bruckner’s symphonies are some of the most self-consciously monumental in the classical canon. It can be hard to imagine – let alone hear – those murmuring openings and vast, brassy climaxes without the precision and power of a modern symphony orchestra. But to mark the composer’s 200th birthday, the period-instrument Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment continued its unhurried foray into the late-Romantic repertory with Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony.
If “historically informed performance” suggests holier-than-thou small-scale, think again: this one featured eight brass players, with six double-basses as the formidable engine of a hefty string section. The big tunes surged. In the relatively intimate acoustic of the QEH, the breakthrough chorales verged on deafening. There was little information about the instruments themselves – simply “closer to those that would have been used in Bruckner’s day” – but such quibbles fade to meaningless in the face of results this thrilling.
The strings (presumably playing on gut) were mellow and translucent, vibrato used sparingly. Richness of tone – and this was a seriously deluxe, velveteen richness – emerged from exquisite bow control. Woodwind solos were characterful in the extreme: laser-like in focus, the flute almost hollow in its woodiness, double reeds raw and acidic, all precision-sculpted. The brass injected periodic blooms of luminosity but remained deeply connected to the rest of the orchestral tissue, never dominating even in the finale’s deeply carved apotheosis.
On the podium, negotiating the numerous structural challenges of this symphony, was Adam Fischer. Sometimes he leaned back like a man waiting for a bus; sometimes he looked as if he was dancing with a light sabre in a phone box; sometimes he wielded his baton like a meat-cleaver. He switched gears from spacious to frantic more or less instantaneously, driving the orchestra like a custom-built sports car through the twists, halts and repetitive eddies of Bruckner’s score. Every pizzicato phrase had its own shape, every silence-pocked passage a sense of macro-structure. The long, generous melody of the second movement relaxed like a collective exhalation. But Fischer came into his own handling Bruckner’s obsessive repetitions: pushing through circles of fifths and fugal mechanics, constantly in search of the bigger picture.