Not just any Bruckner.

The Eighth.

And play it well, consistently, on a high level, keeping the audience
enthralled - no noise, couple of defections: spectacular for Bruckner.  A
great accomplishment for any music organization, but especially for a small
regional orchestra, which had to shop around to find the extra players.

Given the conditions, tonight's concert by the Berkeley Symphony
in Zellerbach Hall, conducted by Kent Nagano, was a very special
accomplishment.  And even without any consideration, just listening
to the Bruckner, a performance to remember.

The strings (Stuart Canin, concertmaster) were especially spectacular,
working through their 84 minutes of music-from-hell without showing effort.
Woodwinds played impeccably, some of the brass was excellent, some not.
But those are details.  As with Bruckner himself, what's important about
the performance is the whole, the gestalt, the entire work.  And that's
where Nagano and the orchestra made a deep impression.

This was an Eighth (in the Haas edition of the 1890 version), which
went way beyond just "getting it right," but it's difficult to say
what characterized the performance - phrases were well executed, but
not particularly crisp, those irresistible Bruckner crescendos were in
order, but not terrifically exciting, the climaxes effective, but not
heaven-storming.

All this added up and made sense in that giant third movement, 27 minutes
of "even music-making," without the sweep of the first movement, the
surging energy of the second, the grand synthesis of the fourth.  Yes, it
was the "uneventful" slow movement - its tentative prayer slowly reaching
a quiet radiance - that revealed what was special about Nagano's Bruckner:
it's exactly RIGHT, not too lyrical, too dramatic, too anything - just
right.

The quality of details might have been quite different from performances
by great European orchestras, but Nagano - even with this "small regional
orchestra" - reached the level of rightness, which characterizes those
European performances, under the baton of a Kempe, a Haitink, a Blomstedt,
a Skrowaczewski.  That is, a BRUCKNER Eighth, not a Mehta or a Karajan
Eighth of ego and excess.

In the 23rd year of his unselfish stewardship of the Berkeley Symphony,
Nagano brought the orchestra to the point that when it performs Bruckner,
the discussion is about the interpretation, not how they "got through it."
And that, indeed, is a Little Orchestra That Can.

(The concert opened with a good reading of Britten's "Lachrymae," Linda
Ghidossi-DeLuca playing the solo correctly, but with a dry tone bordering
on the dull.)

Janos Gereben/SF, CA
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