{TABLE} Piano Concerto in C minor K491 ............. Mozart Symphony No 2 .............................. Bruckner {/TABLE} THERE are few problems in music to rival that of sorting out the different versions of Bruckner's symphonies.
Quite how the early published versions related to the composer's wishes became a matter for scholars to unravel, and the 1930s saw the start of an edition which intended to provide the world with reliable, authentic texts. The man in charge was Robert Haas and his editions are still regularly used. Yet after the war, a new editor, Leopold Nowak, took, charge of the Bruckner project and began to replace the editions of Haas with materially different editions of his own.
The turn against Haas is well evidenced in a recent Musical Times article by The Irish Times Belfast music critic, Dermot Gault. "It is now clear," he declared, "that the Haas editions of Symphonies Nos 2 and 8 - the very scores where Haas differs most from and is most preferred to Nowak - are in authentic amalgams, purely personal ad hoc compromises...
This preamble is by way of explaining the rarity of what the National Symphony Orchestra offered at the NCH on Friday night the as yet unpublished 1872 version of Bruckner's Second Symphony. This contains tracts of music missing from the published versions of both Nowak (who was reproducing an 1877 version,) and Haas, as well as, differing in numerous details, of orchestration and figuration from those editions.
The NSO's performance under Georg Tintner (with, unknown, to RTE's Haas following programme note writer, the repeat laden Scherzo placed second) carried a persuasive Brucknerian ambience, leaving, in spite of some rough details of balance and ensemble, a very positive impression of this, the most extended version of the Second Symphony.
In the first half of the concert, Peter Donohoe was the musically judicious though hardly Mozartian soloist in the Piano Concerto in C minor, K491, in which he offered the rare spectacle of Busoni's fascinatingly elaborate, discursively chromatic cadenzas.
