‘Cathedrals in sound”: it’s a cliche, but it’s still the best description of Bruckner’s symphonies, colossal works by a composer hewing away at huge slabs of music in order to glorify his God. Bruckner never finished the Ninth, but on his deathbed he suggested that his Te Deum might make a fitting choral finale, Beethoven-style. That’s how Nathalie Stutzmann chose to present the work, in the second of her two concerts with the LSO celebrating the bicentenary of the composer’s birth.
It was a flying visit for the French contralto-turned-conductor, and a hardworking one given that their other programme, three days earlier, had included Bruckner’s equally massive Symphony No 7. But then Stutzmann is not a conductor who lacks stamina, physical or musical. She has been acclaimed recently for her Bruckner and Wagner, claiming a place for herself in repertoire that has previously had some of the more forbidding male gatekeepers. Much of her interpretation of the Ninth was relatively light on its feet, and the hour-plus of Bruckner’s three orchestral movements sped by, with an almost lilting momentum threading through the many succeeding episodes of the first movement.
Passages of eloquently expressive playing alternated with ones that felt monumental and even monolithic – if this was a musical edifice, we were being directed to admire not only the details beautifully carved on to the surface but also the sheer heft of the building blocks. You could hear this in the second movement, where dry-sounding plucked strings above an expressionless but ever-increasing drone in the woodwind formed an unsettling lead-in to the pounding main theme, only to be succeeded by silky, supple violins – this was a clash of the human and the mechanical.
Stutzmann led us from the glowing third movement into the Te Deum with barely a pause. In this context it’s hard to know whether to think of the piece as a devotional work or the culmination of a secular epic, but Stutzmann made it work either way. The quartet of soloists, led by Robin Tritschler’s powerfully projected tenor and Alexander Tsymbalyuk’s cavernous bass, struck a balance between churchiness and amplitude, and the London Symphony Chorus sang with fervent conviction.