NCH, Dublin

Bruckner – Symphony No 8

Gerhard Markson likes his Bruckner sure and solid. He’s a conductor who strives to ensure that things sound well-ordered. He likes the building blocks to fall neatly into place. He values logic, and he works hard to ensure that music can be heard to speak straight and true.

Bruckner is a composer rich in paradoxes. His music is at once of the earth and the heavens. His symphonies are the among the longest of the 19th century. They essay great spans through surge after surge, and yet they can break off, apparently almost in mid- statement, for a change of mood and direction.

The satisfaction that’s to be had from Markson’s directness and thoroughness is limited by the easiness of the urgency he projects. This is not primarily a matter of speed. Bruckner, as it were, doesn’t just lift. He heaves. And it’s the sometimes sticky effort of the heaving which can make the glorious blaze of the resulting climaxes so thoroughly satisfying.

Markson may have been light in conveying an ideal sense of traction. But he coloured everything with care, kept his long-term goals in sight, and marshalled his forces with commendable focus, although there were clear signs of fatigue or strain in the playing of the fourth movement, where, it may well be, that the briskness of the speed was also part of the problem.

It’s the Bruckner who unexpectedly holds his breath or heaves great sighs who most often eluded Markson in the Eighth Symphony. Bruckner is a composer who moves frequently to the threshold of other- worldliness. For all its obvious strengths, the failing of Friday’s performance was to keep him too obviously within the bounds of what is clearly known.