It is with a certain rapturous sense of wonder that I have just listened
through to the new recording of Boulez conducting the Bruckner 8th with the
Vienna Philharmonic.  I must say I did not ever think I would ever get to
hear this performance, but here it is.

A few years ago I had read an interview in a Japanese music magazine
with Pierre Boulez in which he talked of an imminent public performance
of the Bruckner 8th with the Vienna Phil.  He admitted that it had been at
the instigation of the orchestra members themselves who had asked that he
play Bruckner with them.  The choice of the 8th symphony had been Boulez's
own - he was attracted by the slow movement.  He said that he would never
have thought of playing Bruckner himself, and considered the situation akin
to the one in which he took up conducting Parsifal at Wieland Wagner's
suggestion, a task which he first hesitated in doing only to discover much
in the process.  He considered himself as much a pupil of the orchestra
which has a very deep affinity to Bruckner, who tend to regard him as
their very own.  Boulez thought that as far as he was aware he was the
first French conductor to conduct Bruckner since Cluytens many years ago.
Whatever the case this may well be the first official commercial recording
of a Bruckner symphony by a French conductor.

Recently the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard described Messian as "le
Bruckner francais dans le 20eme siele".  I rather liked that.  Of course
Boulez is a pupil of Messian, but moreover I have always been struck by
a deeper seated parallel between Boulez and Bruckner.  As a composer I
have always been impressed at just how "Brucknerian" Boulez can sound.
They both seem to have an initially austerity of a sort often mistaken for
coldness, which on greater familiarity reveals a sublime inward hush on a
scale nothing sort of cosmologic.  There is a difference of course in that
Bruckner is more spirualistic whereas Boulez (who did his PhD in higher
level mathematics) seems more a thesis in astrophysics.  The two paths
however always seem to mysteriously converge.  But it is not I think
inappropriate to approach the riddle of Bruckner's mystical sound world
with the sort of puzzlement one might contemplate Schroedinger's cat.

Any musical interpretation is worth recording for posterity only if we are
capable of learning something new.  That is why I cannot stomach so much
of Baremboim's regurgitation of the ideas the great interpreters of the
past such as Furtwaengler in a way which really seem rather cliche.  It
is a pleasure to hear that Boulez actually sounds like he has sat down and
really thought through the symphony afresh for himself.  I am reminded of
how Walter Legge marvelled at how Furtwaengler would spend hours sitting
down and thinking over Beethoven scores which in many ways he already knew
backwards.  Yet there is much in the orchestral playing that sounds
uncharacteristic of Boulez, suggesting that he has indeed been humble
enough to allow himself to learn from the experience of the greatest
of all Bruckner orchestras.  The resultant partnership really does work
wonderfully.  Yet overall it is Boulez's masterly grip of the structure
of the work as a whole and the bigger picture which really comes through.
I have rarely if ever heard the work as a whole sound so cohesive and so
utterly convincing.  Passages such as the opening of the development of
the finale suddenly take on a new 'structural' meaning of their own, rather
than sounding like mere bridge passages.  Everything seems to click into
its rightful place.  Even the seemingly odd fast tempo for the opening of
the finale seems to be a rhetorical device which allows a stronger contrast
with the later part of the recapitulation and coda where the tempo is
broadened out to huge dramatic effect, a rhetorical-structural tempo change
of the sort used by Furtwaengler with similar respect for the structural
integrity of the work.

At this point there will always be somebody who will want to draw
comparison with Furtwaengler's extraordinary 1944 recording, Karajans
last recording (both not surprisingly also with the Vienna Phil.) or even
Horenstein.  To this I can say that Boulez strikes me worthy of comparison,
but like each of the other conductors he has his own unique insights that
the others lack.  Therein lies the ultimate justification for this recorded
sound document.  To call it refreshing would be an insult.  No rather it is
just simply inspirational.

Satoshi Akima
Sydney
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