Bruckner: Symphony No. 5

By now it has become clear what Thielemann’s Bruckner interpretations are, and are not. They are not fulminant, incendiary realizations of the kind Furtwängler (and occasionally Karajan) could deliver, nor do they replicate the visionary immediacy of Bruno Walter, the monumentality of Gunter Wand, or the searing, transcendent emotion of Jochum and Giulini. What they are, like Karajan’s Bruckner, is beautiful—in an unhurried, other-worldly sense—spacious, and organic. And they are realized by the one orchestra, in the one space, the Musikverein, that can truly do justice to Bruckner’s vast sonic conceptions. True, more than any Bruckner symphony, the Fifth cries out urgently for an apocalyptic vision—if those leaping triads and annunciatory brass fanfares a few bars in from its start aren’t a summons to the Apocalypse, I don’t know what is—yet it responds wondrously to Thielemann’s patient approach. Its sonorous power and magisterial counterpoint have never been more beautifully revealed, and one encounters within, if one is receptive, a spirituality that is Parsifalian before Parsifal. The Fifth is also, with the Ninth, the hardest nut to crack among Bruckner’s symphonies. Thielemann and the Viennese crack it handsomely here.