Double double.

After trying something a bit out of the ordinary last time around, Tom Lyle and Ye Grumpy Olde Editor are back to doing what we usually do in this column, independently auditioning two competing recordings of large-scale orchestral music, comparing them sonically and musically in a few brief paragraphs, and picking our favorite.

Some number of issues back, Tom and I compared two recordings of Bruckner's Symphony No. 8, a work both of us really admire. Unfortunately, the effort nearly did us both in, and we swore that we would never again choose such a monumental composition for comparison. So what are we going to compare this time around? You guessed it--two recordings of the Bruckner Symphony No. 8. The temptation to compare competing recordings by two of the world's greatest orchestras, both of which have a reputation of excellence in the music of Bruckner, was simply too much to resist.

On one hand we have the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in their newest recording of Bruckner's score (Nowak edition), led this time around by Riccardo Chailly in a performance that was recorded in 1999 but not released until 2002 on the Decca label (Decca 466 653-2). On the other hand we have the Vienna Philharmonic recorded live at the 1996 International Bruckner Festival under the direction of composer/conductor Pierre Boulez on a Deutsche Grammophon CD (DGG 289 459 678-2) that was released in 2000. The DGG recording had emerged the victor in our previous Double Double Bruckner 8th comparison, edging out the late Georg Tintner's Naxos release: how would it fare against Amsterdam's fabled Bruckner specialists?

As always, Tom and I have refrained from discussing these two recordings with each other and have written our remarks entirely independently. Because this is an odd-numbered issue, I will lead off with my observations and then Tom will present things from his point of view.

KWN: Comparing these two recordings of Bruckner's magnificent Symphony No. 8 has shown me that is not wise to jump to quick conclusions based on casual listening. Although Tom has taken me to task for this in the past, I must confess that as usual, I began my comparative listening by playing both of these CDs through my computer at work. Although I certainly have enough sense not to do all my listening through this system, I have found in the past that by listening to CDs through this admittedly lo-fi medium, I am usually able to make some judgments about the relative merits of the performances, which I then later refine by performing more intense comparative listening sessions on my home system.

When I listened to the two Bruckner discs this way, my overall impression was that there was really very little to pick between them. The impression that this would be a really close comparison was reinforced by the times I played the music on my home system but without listening closely. (An aside here: the music of Bruckner works on many different levels. It has often been compared to an aural Gothic cathedral, something vast yet incredibly detailed. It works wonderfully as background music, being vast and timeless, but its very vastness demands careful listening to gain full appreciation.)

When I finally sat down to do more focused comparative listening, my thought was that it was going to be really hard to choose between these two recordings, and that I was in for some painstaking, extended comparative listening sessions. When I first started listening, this mindset was reinforced by my initial observation that both CDs seemed to be mastered at a similar volume level, and that they both sounded similar in terms of their sonic signature. I listened to both recordings many times, always enjoying both, and wondering how I was going to be able to choose between them.