Intuitive gifts: Nathalie Stutzmann unlocks the secrets of late Bruckner

Bruckner knew for years before his death in 1896 that the Ninth Symphony would be his last. Most performances emphasise its otherworldly nature, its alien harmony and sometimes galactically slow rate of change, as though the elderly composer already had one eye on what lies beyond, and his hoped-for, Gerontian encounter with the Almighty: “dem Lieben Gott”, the dedicatee of the symphony. By contrast, Nathalie Stutzmann underlined the Ninth’s many points of correlation with the previous eight numbered symphonies, as a fitting albeit incomplete culmination to his life’s work. The performance confirmed her intuitive gifts as a Brucknerian, three days after she and the London Symphony Orchestra had given a no less illuminating and unselfconsciously distinctive account of the Seventh.

Stutzmann’s method was not a matter of “going period” on Bruckner, stripping varnish or anything so routine. She has done the hard yards of interrogating every bar of these scores for herself, not realising them in a generic and commonplace “Bruckner style” but working out which voices should sing out when, which notes in a chord should ring and which others should echo them in complementary resonance.

Rhythm, too, was scrupulously handled: the triple-dotted head motif was sprung into action rather than hammered into place or massaged into a coma. The only notable instance of a radical departure from convention arrived with the repeat of the Scherzo, where she introduced an off-kilter accent on the third as well as the first beat of the bar. Otherwise, if Stutzmann’s Bruckner has a precedent, it might be in the records Bruno Walter left us of Nos. 4, 7 and 9, full of wisdom, warmth and love.

The LSO had evidently given her time enough to work out these ideas in rehearsal, and no less evidently she had got them across. At an early stage in the Adagio of the Ninth, she had the cellos articulate their leading line with pure tone while the other strings vibrated freely around them: a striking effect of instrumental lighting. The Scherzos of both symphonies raced off like whippets. The gaunt opening tutti of the Ninth thundered out but elsewhere she kept the brass carefully reined back, at least until the climactic, screaming dissonance of the Adagio. At the end of the first two movements, Stutzmann even conjured something like three seconds of sounding space from the Barbican’s unpromising acoustic.

Though he continued working on it until the morning of his death, Bruckner came to realise that the task of completing the finale was beyond him, whether from lack of time, health or confidence. He once made the hopeful suggestion that his setting of the Te Deum, completed 12 years earlier, might serve in its stead. This performance, following the Adagio of the Ninth with barely a pause for breath, shared the virtues of the symphony, scrupulously well prepared and paced. Largely confined to chant-like declamation at either pianissimo or fortissimo, the London Symphony Chorus dispatched their unrewarding parts with unflagging energy, and the tenor Robin Tritschler took his starring role with an appealing, Schubertian vitality, well supported by Lucy Crowe, Anna Stéphany and Alexander Tsymbalyuk.

A touch more unfettered jubilation could have brought the Te Deum to its close, but there are many more inherent reasons why it makes only a tenth-rate finale to the Ninth. Until the long-gestated, committee-composed completion by Samale, Cohrs, Phillips and Mazzuca catches on, the symphony is destined to remain a torso, and in that form Stutzmann has the full measure of it.