On 4 September 2024, the classical world of music, and especially its Austro-Germanic heartland, will celebrate the bicentenary of Anton Bruckner’s birth. Australia’s homage to this symphonic Titan is relatively modest, though these months do include performances of his Ninth (Brisbane, QSO, Johannes Fritzsch), and Fourth (Melbourne and Geelong, MSO, Daniel Carter; Hobart, TSO, Eivind Aadland), along with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s four performances of the Eighth Symphony, under Simone Young. Her global reputation increasingly rides on dynamic interpretations of large later-Romantic works, by Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, as well as Bruckner.

So, which Eighth Symphony? This question does matter, as with all Bruckner’s (arguably, nine) symphonies there are variants, versions, and scholarly editions aplenty – no less than six, in the Eighth’s case – which help to keep a small army of forensic musicologists and critics happily in business. Audience members do notice the differences in duration between these variant forms – sometimes up to fifteen or twenty minutes – as well as startling changes of content.

On Wednesday night, using a score based upon Bruckner’s first (1887) version, the first movement ended with a fortissimo blast rather than the pianissimo whimper of (most) later versions. Conductors line up with their favourite forms for this orchestral juggernaut, armed with arguments about genetic purity, sensible or senseless ‘compromise’, relative playability, or simply through knowing the speed needed to keep an evening audience in thrall, or even just awake. Current doyen of Bruckner conductors, the ninety-seven-year-old Swede Herbert Blomstedt, recently hailed this work as a ‘miracle symphony’, noting in the February 2024 issue of Gramophone its highly organic, yet fluid architecture: ‘I believe there is no perfect edition … I have a number of performances of the Eighth planned in the years ahead.’ Blomstedt promptly went on, in May, to conduct a performance with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, informed by a new (Hawkshaw) edition of Bruckner’s 1887 original. The sixty-three-year-old Young, using a somewhat less scrupulous (Nowak) edition, from 1972, stands at the lower end of conductors in terms of performance duration of any of the Eighth’s versions.

Wednesday’s performance showed off the Opera House’s Concert Hall at its acoustic and logistical best. With four traditional instrumental-only movements, requiring a ninety-five-piece orchestra, it elegantly filled the renovated Hall’s stage, and played to a comfortably full house. The work’s corporate tonal balance is built around a full contingent of sixty-three strings (including three harps) and sixteen brass, with a smaller complement of woodwinds and scant percussion. Yet those winds, especially SSO’s excellent flute, clarinet, and oboe principals, featured illustriously in quieter or more transitional moments, and most deliciously in their cameo solos, duos, or trios. Most distinctive, however, to the rich string-brass orchestral sound, and especially notable in its stalwart final movement, was the busy deployment of nine horn players, including four who switched on occasion to ‘Wagner tubas’ (with skyward facing bells). Curiously, then, it was in the exposed opening and treacherous closing moments of the symphony that the Orchestra momentarily let us glimpse behind an otherwise impressively united corporate posture.

Augustin Hadelich performs Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, photographed by Ken Leanfore

In shaping her muscular and energetic interpretation, Young well balances the competing claims of Bruckner’s dedication to Wagnerian melodic development (although less chromatic than Wagner), and his constant recourse to an almost baroque repetition and sequencing of short mottos. These are the tools by which he, in composition, and Young, in performance, build relentlessly to compelling climaxes. In the third, slow movement, Young audibly stamped her foot to start the final push to the top, where the climax is capped by the singular appearance of cymbals and triangle. Yet, as Wagner and later Richard Strauss demonstrate, the way down from climaxes can be tricky, with thematic and tonal plans sometimes taking divergent pathways, and the composer’s slow winding down of the music’s tension risking a dangerous loss of momentum. Young sure-footedly negotiated these concluding twists and turns, leaving this third movement as the most impressive interpretation of the evening.

If one German word summarises Bruckner’s desired approach to so much of this symphony’s content, it is feierlich. The term is found in the instructions to all movements except the second, Scherzo and Trio. Meaning ‘solemn’ or ‘ceremonial’, its range of English meanings can extend from ‘grave’ to ‘festive’. Young and her orchestra wonderfully explored these various shades of mood, sensibly preferring not to rush the tempos and thereby avoiding a temptation to extend the soundscape to ‘brilliance’, on the one hand, or to ‘bombast’, on the other. Only as the fourth movement found its way towards its final, tonic affirmation did that more modest sense of feierlich become overwhelmed by the sheer tutti blaze of sound.

The audience seemed gobsmacked by Bruckner’s Eighth. The applause was relatively perfunctory, hardly giving time for the conductor to recognise the instrumentalists of particular note (starting, understandably, with the first horn), let alone for all to give adequate acknowledgment of the towering achievement it is to conduct such an organic, ‘miracle symphony’ so cogently. The programming was partly to blame. Bruckner’s symphony appeared as the second ‘half’ of the SSO’s program, although being three times the length of Mendelssohn’s sparkling E-minor Violin Concerto, which commanded the first ‘half’. There, soloist Augustin Hadelich had wowed everyone, including the orchestra itself. His fleet-of-finger intonation and silky phrasing suited the light textures that Mendelssohn intended. His bowing was so artful that its changes of direction were, in more lyrical passages, simply undetectable. The audience response had been close to ecstatic, eliciting an encore that generated further waves of applause. How could the dour Bruckner’s long and solemn work, dedicated to none other than the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph himself, even compare?

Augustin Hadelich Performs Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto was performed in the Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House on 7, 8, 9, and 10 August 2024. Performance attended: 7 August.