Hartmut Haenchen conducts Bruckner 8

THE APOCALYPTIC

One of the gems of the early cello repertoire is Joseph Haydn’s Second Cello Concerto. Recent research has revealed that Haydn wrote this very classical composition in 1783 for James Cervetto, the principal cellist of the Italian Opera House in London. His brilliant virtuosity and expressive lyricism “rivalled the best tenors of his time” and inspired Haydn to write a highly melodic, aria-like middle movement on the one hand, and a sparkling passage work in the two corner movements on the other. Winner of the first ever Queen Elisabeth Cello Competition, Victor Julien-Laferrière already managed to score with Haydn’s Second Cello Concerto in his semi-final in 2017 and now returns to Brussels for a new performance of this work with the musicians of the Belgian National Orchestra.

The German-Dutch conductor Hartmut Haenchen, now 80, continues his Bruckner cycle with his last complete symphony: the monumental, all-embracing Eighth. The deeply religious and selfdoubting composer Anton Bruckner has delivered his masterpiece with this nearly hour-and-a-half long composition: a mighty cathedral of sound, whose first movement does not end triumphantly but with an atypical silence, as if “one is on his deathbed, and opposite hangs a clock, which, while his life comes to its end, beats on ever steadily”. All registers are covered: the second movement follows the dreams of a simple-minded bourgeois, while at the beginning of the fourth and final movement Bruckner tells how the emperor of the dual monarchy Franz Joseph I meets the Russian tsar. With a death march and subsequent transfiguration, Bruckner crowns the music of the 19th century in his Eighth Symphony in a truly masterly fashion.

Hartmut Haenchen, conductor
Victor Julien-Laferrière, cello

© Photo by Riccardo Musacchio