‘Cathedrals in sound”: it’s a cliche, but it’s still the best description of Bruckner’s symphonies, colossal works by a composer hewing away at huge slabs of music in order to glorify his God. Bruckner never finished the Ninth, but on his deathbed he suggested that his Te Deum might make a fitting choral finale, Beethoven-style. That’s how Nathalie Stutzmann chose to present the work, in the second of her two concerts with the LSO celebrating the bicentenary of the composer’s birth.
It was a flying visit for the French contralto-turned-conductor, and a hardworking one given that their other programme, three days earlier, had included Bruckner’s equally massive Symphony No 7. But then Stutzmann is not a conductor who lacks stamina, physical or musical. She has been acclaimed recently for her Bruckner and Wagner, claiming a place for herself in repertoire that has previously had some of the more forbidding male gatekeepers. Much of her interpretation of the Ninth was relatively light on its feet, and the hour-plus of Bruckner’s three orchestral movements sped by, with an almost lilting momentum threading through the many succeeding episodes of the first movement.
