Bruckner of freshness and grandeur in Liverpool

After Sunday’s Mahler 3 in Manchester, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra gave the North-West another rarely heard symphony of epic proportions, here playing Bruckner’s Eighth with unwavering freshness and punch.

The first striking thing about Domingo Hindoyan’s approach to this enormous titan of a symphony was the absence of a music stand or score in front of him. Few conductors can know this symphony well enough to conduct from memory, though the benefits quickly became apparent. Though vast in scale, much of the 80-minute symphony felt arrestingly intimate in dialogue between conductor and sections of his orchestra. Perhaps this also helped keep up the music’s constant sense of freshness and lightness. While the peaks of the first movement were suitably huge, towering moments of catastrophe, it was refreshing to hear this music stripped of its usual clichés and pitfalls. With generally forward-looking tempos and crisp textures, there was never any threat of stodge or brass overblowing. In the similarly fleet-footed Scherzo, which embraced elegance alongside violent tremolandos, there were some attractive interactions between the three harps and solo horn.

The first two movements flew past in a flurry, and so the remarkable pianissimos achieved in the slow movement made for a welcome contrast in its stillness. Here the soft ebb and flow of the string section created a sense of vast, timeless space, while the Wagner tuba quartet played with astonishing softness and immaculate blending. The huge climax, capped with its two cymbal clashes, was followed by a reeling, anguished string sound. The string and brass playing in the coda was gloriously nourishing.

The fourth movement marched into view in imperious, brutal style, combining an utterly focussed brass sound with crisp grace notes in the string section. The opening energy never sagged, and the rest of the movement unfolded with a compelling sense of narrative. The woodwinds offered brief glimpses of resolution deep in the heart of the movement, though it was the fire of the brass which drove the music towards the finish line. Amid the clatter of the big tutti sections, light was shone on plenty of details even while brass blazed and strings scrubbed furiously. In the last pages, Hindoyan sculpted an ascent which took the symphony striding into its ultimate realisation of C major. This was Bruckner with all the requisite grandeur, but also an uncommon sense of freshness.