Bruckner Third Symphony – Van Zweden

Bruckner never quite escaped Upper Austria. You can hear it in the Third Symphony — the village organist who became the most cosmically ambitious symphonist of the nineteenth century, the man who genuflected before Wagner and yet made music that sounds like nothing Wagner ever dreamed of. The D-minor symphony is the work in which those contradictions first fully collide, and they collide magnificently.

Jaap van Zweden chooses the 1877 revision here, which is the right call for a conductor interested in architectural coherence rather than archaeological curiosity. The original 1873 score is a fascinating document — sprawling, stuffed with explicit Wagner quotations that Bruckner eventually thought better of — but the tighter 1877 text is where the symphony’s genuine structural logic asserts itself. (The 1889 version, substantially revised by Franz Schalk and Ferdinand Löwe, is another matter entirely and best left to specialists.) Van Zweden is not a director who draws attention to his own choices. That is a virtue here.

The Hilversum studio release serves him well. Remarkably well, in fact.

What strikes you immediately — in those opening bars where the trumpet theme emerges out of the string tremolo — is how carefully van Zweden has thought through the phrase structure. Bruckner’s orchestration in the first movement’s initial subject is subtler than it looks on the page; there are internal articulations, small dynamic gradations, that most conductors either iron flat or exaggerate into rhetoric. Van Zweden does neither. The balance between sections is almost ideally judged, and the engineers at MCO5 have given him a sound picture that is atmospheric without being reverberant to the point of blur — a real danger in Bruckner, where the hall can become a kind of conspirator against clarity.

The first movement builds with genuine cumulative force. When the exposition drives toward its dramatic close, the release of energy feels earned rather than imposed — the difference between a climax that the music has been preparing and one that the conductor simply announces. That distinction matters enormously in Bruckner, whose long-range tonal planning depends on the listener’s sense that the architecture has been inevitable all along.

The slow movement is where this orchestra really distinguishes itself. The strings of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic play with a warmth and continuity of line that you don’t always find in European radio orchestras, which can sometimes sound efficient rather than luminous. Here the legato is genuinely sustained — not manufactured in the editing suite — and when the woodwinds carry the melodic thread above the string texture, the balance shifts with the naturalness of breathing. The pianissimo passages are exquisitely handled. Bruckner’s Andantes exist in a kind of suspended time, and van Zweden understands that rushing toward the next climax destroys the very thing that makes the climax meaningful.

Then the Scherzo arrives and everything changes. Bruckner the peasant reasserts himself — stamping, earthy, a little dangerous. This is ländler music transformed by sheer scale into something that sounds like a giant’s dance, and van Zweden and the orchestra throw themselves into its rhythmic brutality with an authenticity that is almost startling. The rustic origins feel viscerally present. There’s a weight to the downbeats that suggests not lederhosen exactly but something older and harder underfoot — stone floors, the smell of cold stone.

The finale is the symphony’s perennial problem, and no conductor has ever fully solved it. Bruckner himself clearly wrestled with it across all three versions, and the 1877 text, for all its improvements, still presents a finale that seems to be reaching for a resolution it can’t quite consolidate. Van Zweden manages it better than many — the momentum rarely flags, and he avoids the besetting sin of treating the closing pages as a mere accumulation of volume. But the finale remains the finale. It is what it is, and Bruckner scholars have been making their peace with it for a long time.

As a recording of this symphony, this belongs among the better recent accounts — above the routine, occasionally reaching genuine distinction. Collectors who know Eugen Jochum’s old Berlin Philharmonic recording, or Georg Tintner’s cycle for Naxos, will find van Zweden’s approach more assertive than Tintner’s, less monumental than Jochum’s, and in the slow movement at least, as satisfying as either. That is not faint praise.