The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra's new season will include cycles of the symphonies of both Nielsen and Schumann, but it opened on Thursday with Bruckner's Third. It's a problematic score from all perspectives.
Bruckner repeatedly revised the score, leaving three distinctly different versions, and the first of those also survives in two different editions. Oramo chose what is arguably the most convincing alternative, the final 1889 revision, which the composer made in collaboration with the conductor Franz Schalk.
There are still difficulties with this score, especially in the last movement, which is more episodic than a symphonic structure on this scale really needs to be, and lacks the kind of consistency that the best Bruckner finales provide. But Oramo and the CBSO managed to bind the disparate elements together into an authoritative conclusion. They launched the symphony with great panache too, even if the range of dynamics was narrower than ideal, with no real pianissimos, and built that great structure to a majestic climax.
The central pair of movements were less well judged; the orchestral playing lacked the refinement it had elsewhere, and the pacing of some of the sections was uneven. The Mendelssohnian elements of the scherzo were appropriately lightweight, but the complementary sections of elemental power occasionally lacked focus and intensity, and some of the thematic statements in the slow movement were undercharacterised.
The first half of the concert had been much more straightforward. Oramo paced the Overture to Wagner's Tannhäuser acutely, relishing the roundness and polish of the CBSO's trombone section - though he was unable to disguise a touch of brittleness in the string tone when pushed really hard. He provided perfectly scaled support to the violinist Christian Tetzlaff in Mozart's Fifth Violin Concerto in A major, K219. Tetzlaff certainly imposed himself on the work, turning the first movement into an essay in Sturm und Drang, and finding yet more darkness in the finale, but his playing was always refined and musical.
