One of those legendary British classical music comedy events, the Hoffnung Festival Concerts, featured a recorder and harpsichord ensemble playing Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, complete with cap pistols instead of cannon. The main difference between that performance and the contents of this CD is that the Hoffnung folks were silly on purpose, and they took only about a 10th of the time the Thomas Christian Ensemble takes to commit murder on Bruckner’s mighty Seventh Symphony as reduced for 10-piece chamber group.
Hanns Eisler, Erwin Stein, and Karl Rankl made this arrangement for Arnold Schoenberg’s “Society for Private Musical Performances”, a group that put on concerts for members only, with the press banned and any approval or disapproval of the music or the performances (which the founders modestly touted as “exemplary”) forbidden. But this outfit had a problem: it couldn’t afford an orchestra. So much of the music they played was in chamber arrangements. In this case Bruckner’s 100-man orchestra with expanded brass section is portrayed by a string quintet making do for an entire orchestral string section, while the brass chorus is played by one horn and a piano duet; a clarinet plus harmonium handle the woodwind parts. In this version, Bruckner’s “Cathedral in Sound” is more suggestive of a chapel.
The Society for Private Musical Performances had the good fortune to go broke before this derangement could be played; the score was lost and forgotten. This fortunate state of affairs ended 80 years later when a musicologist named Hans Winking found it in Schoenberg’s archives. It finally was brought to life in a concert in Cologne in 2000. In this era where, if given the chance, someone will record anything, here it is on CD.
I have to say that the members of the Thomas Christian Ensemble are good musicians who play extremely well. The results are not unmusical. The poignant opening phrase of the symphony sounds promising, as Andrew Joy’s rich French horn sound soars out. But then the string quintet’s tremolando sounds like a silent movie band playing a bad suspense cue, not at all the hushed and reverent effect Bruckner intended. And so it goes from there. There are occasional interesting nuances of timbre and atmosphere, but these are surrounded by long, texturally threadbare sections. When trying to duplicate Bruckner’s awesome crescendos, the ensemble turns raw and shrill. And it’s not helped by MDG’s sound, recorded at a loud orchestra-size level. While this disc has curiosity value, it proves beyond doubt that it simply takes more than 10 musicians, no matter how good they are, to play a Bruckner symphony.
