The New York Times-20080125-In a Show of Accessibility- Schumann Joins Bruckner- -Review-
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In a Show of Accessibility, Schumann Joins Bruckner; [Review]
Full Text (478 words)Radu Lupu and the Schumann Piano Concerto have been making separate appearances in New York City this season, but the two are getting together this week at the New York Philharmonic. On Wednesday the Schumann joined Bruckner's Sixth Symphony at Avery Fisher Hall for this week's subscription program. Riccardo Muti was the conductor, continuing his extended visit with the orchestra.
The concerto is as familiar as the symphony is esoteric, but Mr. Lupu made the music interesting even for listeners who know the piece too well. Schumann makes beautiful sounds while playing nasty tricks on pianists. This pianist greeted them all with his usual calm command. Mr. Lupu inflects phrases in ways most of us would not think of doing, but they sound right.
Unusual was the way the piano part was made to mingle with the orchestra rather than to stand out against it. When high-register melodic lines shifted from the keyboard's treble keys to violin sections, Mr. Lupu changed from soloist to accompanist. Lower voices rose out of the bottom and middle of the piano and became principal players. Again and again one heard a leading man happy to give way to his supporting cast. If Mr. Lupu had been a singer, he would certainly have been a tenor or a bass.
Bruckner and Muti are not proper names one often finds in the same sentence, but Mr. Muti has a way of coming up with repertory that is not particularly new, but not particularly well known either. The combination was odd: a rural Austrian composer of wide-body symphonies in search of the mystical and the ecstatic; a no-nonsense conductor devoted to clear, well-lighted music making; and an orchestra of hugely talented city slickers not given to schmaltz.
The first movement sounded more tough than grand and was not a very good example of opposites attracting. The Adagio movement was breathtakingly beautiful, filled with the oceanic surges of linear writing that represent Bruckner at his best. Leonard Bernstein once said composers write the same piece over and over. Bruckner's Sixth Symphony has different music from the more famous Seventh, but the blueprints match almost exactly.
There is the same slow, broad introduction, the drawn-out climaxes that grow, pull back and then grow some more -- a sort of musical coitus interruptus. There is the abrupt first-movement ending, and the finale that begins with martial brass answered by wistful melody appearing from afar.
Bruckner evidently knew what he wanted his one and only symphony to be, and he made eight and a half tries at it before dying, leaving his Ninth unfinished.
The concert will be repeated on Friday and Saturday at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center; (212) 875-5656; nyphil.org.
[Illustration]PHOTO: The pianist Radu Lupu performed with the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday. Riccardo Muti was the conductor. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIN BAIANO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)