{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. Bruckner carried out revisions of his own, and also followed the advice of friends and colleagues to chop, change, cut, re-write and rescore.
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 texts. The man in charge was Robert Haas, and his editions are still regularly used. Daniel Barenboim and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for instance, relied on Haas for their recent Dublin performance of the Eighth Symphony.
Yet after the war, a new editor, Leopold Nowak, took charge of the Bruckner project and began to replace the Haas editions with materially different editions of his own. Many were received (particularly in Britain) with something between scepticism and contempt. Yet Nowak's principles were sound - identify the versions which Bruckner had approved, and get them into print.
The turn against Haas is well evidenced in a recent Musical Times article by this newspaper's Belfast music critic, Dermot Gault. "It is now clear," he said, "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 inauthentic amalgams, purely personal ad hoc compromises which mix different versions in a way never sanctioned by Bruckner himself.
This lengthy preamble is by way of explaining the rarity of what the National Symphony Orchestra offered at the NCH last night - the as yet unpublished 1872 version of Bruckner's Second Symphony.
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 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 whiche offered the rare spectacle of Busoni's elaborate, discursively chromatic cadenzas.
