Bruckner Symphonies 3 and 6 – Venzago

Bruckner used to be a specialty item, the sort of composer conductors approached only after they had proven themselves in Beethoven and Brahms — a rite of passage, almost priestly. Mario Venzago belongs to a different generation, one less interested in incense and vestments than in finding the dance rhythms and orchestral color that a century of monumentalizing tended to smother. His ongoing cycle for CPO treats the symphonies less as cathedrals and more as living, breathing organisms with pulses you can actually feel. This latest volume, pairing the Third and Sixth with the Berne Symphony Orchestra, continues to make that case. The results are sometimes revelatory, sometimes merely good. Never dull.

Start with the editorial politics of the Third, because Bruckner never let anyone alone on this score. Three versions, three different personalities almost. The 1873 original is sprawling, thorny, packed with quotations from Wagner that the composer later excised out of nervousness or tact — take your pick. The 1877 revision tightens without gutting. The 1889 version, which Venzago has chosen here in Nowak’s edition, cuts hardest of all, especially in the finale, and purists have never fully forgiven it. I understand the objection. Something genuinely strange and personal gets lost when the finale’s architecture is compressed this severely. Themes that used to breathe now feel occasionally rushed past, as if Bruckner, or his well-meaning colleagues, grew impatient with his own discursiveness.

And yet Venzago makes the shorter version sound inevitable rather than expedient. That’s the trick of it.

The first movement’s opening is where you hear immediately what this conductor is after. The famous unison D minor theme emerges out of tremolo string haze, and here the Berne violins produce a real hush — not just quiet playing but quiet with anticipation in it. Horns enter with burnished warmth rather than blare. Bruckner scored this passage with almost obsessive care for how instrumental color should evolve organically, one group handing off to the next like relay runners, and Venzago lets you track every handoff. Clarity of engineering helps: you hear inner voices, cello counterlines, that get buried in more reverberant, cathedral-organ-style recordings of this symphony.

The Adagio breathes properly. Strings glow, yes — that word keeps recurring in discussions of this rendition, and it’s the right one, a kind of inner incandescence rather than surface sheen. There’s genuine tenderness here, not the marmoreal solemnity some conductors mistake for depth. The scherzo, meanwhile, stomps and lilts by turns: Ländler energy shot through with something wilder, more Upper Austrian tavern than Viennese ballroom. Bruckner was a countryman his whole life, whatever airs Vienna’s critics — Hanslick chief among his tormentors — tried to strip from him, and Venzago never lets you forget it.

The finale, that famous “polka and chorale” movement, carries Bruckner’s own gloss about a wedding dance next door to a wake. It has been quoted so often it risks becoming a cliché, but the music still startles when it’s played with this kind of textural honesty. The polka trips along with real lightness, almost flippant, and the chorale answers with unforced gravity. Venzago doesn’t over-sanctify it. That restraint pays off.

Turn to the Sixth, a symphony too often shortchanged in the catalog, overshadowed by its siblings on either side — the emotionally fraught Fifth and the valedictory Seventh. Venzago’s account reminds you what a strange, compact, almost Schubertian masterpiece it is. The first movement’s syncopated string figure has genuine rhythmic bite here, an unsettled nervous energy that some slower, more granite-hewn interpretations simply steamroll. The Adagio sings with unforced eloquence; the Scherzo has real snap. Where some ensembles playing this repertoire sound merely dutiful, Berne’s players sound like they’re enjoying themselves. A small thing, but audible.

Is this a Bruckner Sixth to displace Jochum or Wand in the collector’s affections? No, probably not. Those readings carry decades of accumulated wisdom about pacing and weight that Venzago hasn’t entirely matched. But comparison isn’t really the point with this project. Venzago is offering something else: Bruckner without the incense, without the assumption that slow automatically equals profound. Whether you find that liberating or occasionally underpowered will depend on your temperament, and, frankly, your mood on a given evening.

I lean toward liberating. This disc, awkward finale-editions and all, rewards the ear that wants to hear these familiar scores freshly argued rather than reverently embalmed.