A couple of years ago the PSO promised me that they would play the Bruckner Symphony Number 8 in concert, and then ended up changing their minds and playing the Beethoven 9 instead.
This year they made it up to me by again putting the Bruckner into the season as both a live performance and a recording session. As soon as I found out I bought both my normal subscription ticket and a second ticket for the Sunday show to sit up in Family Circle and get the whole thing again from a much better vantage point with much better sound. I somehow missed the Bruckner 7 shows from a few years ago. I was not going to make that mistake again.
The Bruckner and Mahler symphonies are the “apex predators”, if you will, of the late romantic symphony orchestra repertoire. They are long, huge, extended, long, epic, and long works. People just don’t write this sort of thing anymore, a fact emphasized by the companion piece in the concert. Samy Moussa’s Adgilis Deda: Hymn for orchestra, which he wrote for the PSO in 2024, is an excellent piece and fits very well with Bruckner’s style, actually. But its entire length is not even quite as long as the shortest movement in the 8th symphony.
The Bruckner 8 runs about 85 minutes in four movements (about 18, 15, 27, and 25 minutes, respectively). The movements go: not too fast, medium fast, really slow (Adagio), and finale: not that slow, but not too fast. I don’t have the background or vocabulary to describe to you how the piece works. I’ve read a lot of nonsense (my words) about how the piece is about life and death and afterlife. Maybe. I just like the tunes. I think I did notice that the Finale is sonata form this time, which I had not before. That was fun.
But what I do in the all of the big Bruckner pieces is to just sit there and revel in the glory of flow and buildup to the giant brass chorales, marveling at how the orchestra just sounds great whether they are playing slow or fast(er), so loud that the walls shake or so soft that you can barely hear them over the hum of the AC. The peak moment in the famous Adagio in particular is a top “beat drop” in classical music, complete with giant cymbal crashes.
Both of the Bruckner 8 shows that I saw gave me everything I would have wanted from this piece. Best music shows of the year so far. 170 minutes of Bruckner bliss. Sunday was probably slightly better then Friday. It felt tighter and more assured, and Family Circle is the best musical sound that you can experience in Pittsburgh, especially when the PSO is going full blast through a huge piece. You should do it some time. In fact, you should do it in a couple of weeks when they play the Mahler 2, another member of the “one piece takes 80 to 90 minutes or more” club.
In the second show I sat next to an enterprising CMU music student who had also bought tickets to two shows. He thought he was the only one insane enough to do this. The kids are alright.
Meanwhile, over at the Post Gazette (RIP) the classical current music writer Jeremy Reynolds wondered about how to make sense of playing a piece like this in our current time and place. After all, much of the audience (including, perhaps, Jeremy) will have a hard time sitting through the piece, much less actually enjoying or appreciating it. I think he would prefer to hear the more compact and efficient (my words) Brahms style work, rather than Bruckner’s overwrought nonsense. I think this is a fair take. But it would also be sad if we lost live performances of these bigger pieces. The reason is that as I have said in the past, recordings give you only the smallest percentage of the piece that sits on the surface of the sound. You don’t get nearly the full experience of a piece unless it’s performed live in front of your face. So I hope people keep doing it.
Jeremy also brought up the dreaded “talk to the audience about the show before the show” idea, so that people might have a map of what is about to happen to them as they sat down at the start of the 85 minute marathon. I am long on record as hating these talks. I don’t think a ten minute talk before the concert is going to be enough to guide the Bruckner novice to the end of the 80 minute tunnel. And such things just annoy the more experienced audience. In my humble opinion the only way to make sense of a piece like this is to practice and “train”, if you will.
Luckily these days this is really easy. Fire up Spotify, Apple Music, Presto, or Youtube and there will be dozens of available recordings of this piece for you to study. The idea is to listen to it through a few times so that you at least know the bigger structure of the piece before you are in the dark with just your thoughts and the band. For things like the Bruckner this is an absolute must. Listen in short segments at first, and then whole movements, and then finally a couple of complete end to end run throughs. You can do this in a week instead of (or in addition to) scrolling short videos on social media. Then on concert day you’ll know what’s coming, and what favorite moments to anticipate and look forward to. This is great fun.
While there might exist people who can sit down in front of an 80 minute piece cold and just love it immediately—for the regular human I’m not really sure there is any other way to approach this problem than to do this “training” work. Certainly a ten minute talk before show is not going to fill in these gaps. If nothing else playing the piece ahead of time will tell you whether you, like Jeremy, would rather listen to Brahms and Dvorak and thus save your money. This is fine. Not everything is for everyone. I happen to love both, but probably Bruckner more just because he is really so different from everything else you can hear these days.
But… I do have another somewhat unhinged idea that I’m sure no orchestra will ever try, but someone should do it.
Back in the 90s there was a great show on the MTV spinoff network VH1 called “Pop-up Video”. What the show did was play music videos, but overlay them with pithy little bits of meta-commentary.
Here is a modest example.
What makes these videos work is that the content in the “bloops” is the perfect mix of behind the scenes factoids, explanations of the music or production itself and perfectly timed in-jokes.
Why, I ask you, can’t we have Popup-videos for Classical Music? The problem with pre-concert lectures and program notes is that they can never provide enough material to give you something to hold on to for the entire performance. And, it’s always hard to synchronize the material in the notes to what is happening on stage later.
Popup videos solve both of these problems at once since they play along with the performance. I think to make it work we have to be just as mindful as the VH1 producers about the right kind of content to put into the popup messages.
- Comments that just tell you what you are hearing anyway are pointless. Notes that explain the context of what you are hearing are more useful.
- Dry musical analysis about key changes and whatnot are also no fun. On the other hand explaining where the sounds are coming from and how the instruments make them might be useful.
- The notes need to be short and to the point so they don’t interfere with your concentration when listening to the piece.
- Finally, the notes could tell the audience what piece the damn soloist is playing for their encore. I hate not being able to figure this out.
Apple Music Classical actually has a “Guided Listening” feature that is sort of close to this idea. But I think their commentary falls too much into the “here is what they just played” bucket above. For example, the very first bubble in the guide for the Mahler 2 reads something like “the Mahler 2 opens with a violent figure in the basses and violas”, or something. Which is exactly what you are hearing when the text comes up. That’s no fun.
I’m imagining in my head the Beethoven 5 (say) playing, and a little bubble popping up with “Main theme!”… then when the sonata form repeats the main theme the bubble would say “Exposition repeat!” and so forth. In between these form markers would be interesting tidbits about Beethoven’s favorite hangouts, or fashion choices. Well, maybe not. But, remember Peter Schickele’s brilliant play-by-play commentary over the Beethoven 5? It can be done!
For the Bruckner these little bubbles could have explained the ghostly double harmonics that the violins pulled off at the start of the second movement. Or the fuguey bits near the end of the finale. Or how there are 2.5 to 3 different versions of the piece, because this somehow always happens with Bruckner. You now have eighty five minutes to explain eighty five minutes of music. Let’s get to it.
Oh, and yes, I would keep the “bloop!” noises. What the hell.
Final Note
You can use the next two weeks to practice the methods that I have laid out here because on the weekend of March 13-15 the PSO will be playing the Mahler 2 which also runs around 80 to 90min (or more even). This piece has a Choral part too! Hope to see you at Heinz Hall for two days that weekend too.