Celibidache’s Bruckner 5

I spent an hour and a half (!) yesterday with a Youtube video of Sergiu Celibidache and the Munich Philharmonic performing Bruckner 5 in 1985. (260) Anton Bruckner Symphony No 5 in B-flat Major – Sergiu Celibidache, MPO, 1985 – YouTube

This is a VERY slow performance, a full 9 minutes longer than Abbado, also on Youtube, who is himself no speedster in the Bruckner stakes. But for the most part I thought it worked extraordinarily well. The visual image of Ceibidache conducting from memory and keeping a very close eye on what the orchestra’s doing is matched by the sense of concentration in the sound of the orchestra which makes you hang on every note in at least the first three movements, and relish the – not always heard – combinations of instruments at the slow speeds chosen. The slow movement big theme at 27.30 is quite overwhelming, in its string phrasing and clarity, and is as moving as I have ever heard at the speed Celibidache chooses. My usual approach re Bruckner is to say ‘the slower, the better’, but I am not quite sure that quite fits the needs of the last movement of the 5th Symphony, which, in Celibidache’s approach, does fall apart a bit. I lost concentration at several points during the fugal doodling, but the ending is very fine. Certainly this is better than any live performance I’ve ever heard, and maybe is as good as it gets in what is a not wholly convincing finale.

I hadn’t quite worked out who Celibidache was, I’m afraid to say., until I looked him up. I got mixed up with the other distinguished Romanian conductor Constantin Silvestri, who had a long period in Bournemouth………Celibidache by contrast, clearly a very able man, a composer, and a mathematician as well as a conductor, was chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic after the war, before Furtwangler was de-Nazified and took back the reins, and subsequently spent periods of time as chief conductor in Stockholm and Paris before ending his days as the chief conductor in Munich. He was into Buddhism and spiritual practices – maybe Bruckner spoke particularly directly to him as a result.

Anyway, recommended!