Search - Franz Schubert, Brian Newbould, Neville Marriner :: Schubert: The 10 Symphonies

Interesting and well-played: a tip about the "Unfinished"

Serious reader | 02/27/2007

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The standard, finished symphonies in this set are given very standard but glowing performances. It is an excellent set just for that. The special news, of course, is the collection of unfinished orchestral movements included in the disks, including Newbould's conjectural reconstructions of symphony 7 and 10 and a finished Unfinished. The latter two are especially important and beautiful, offering plausible Schubert that bears listening and relistening.



Here is a personal tip concerning the finished Unfinished (8th symphony), which includes the Scherzo that Schubert fully composed in piano score, but only began to orchestrate, and the B-minor Entracte from Rosamunde, often thought to be the intended finale to the 8th symphony.



I recommend making the Scherzo the second movement, and the slow movement the third. There is no precedent for this in the other Schubert symphonies, but there is ample precedent in other classical-period pieces (most famously, Beethoven's ninth symphony). In this symphony, it has the result of making the Scherzo a vigorous palate cleansing between two dreamy movements. I find it works very well, and I much prefer it to the more obvious order. Just a suggestion (but a good one!)."

A landmark recording of a remarkable piece of music history

D. Whitaker | Des Moines, Iowa | 02/22/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"A classical music buff looking at the title of this album could be forgiven for being confused. "The Ten Symphonies"? But Schubert only wrote 7 plus one "Unfinished"... Didn't he?



It turns out the story is more complicated. After writing his first six symphonies, Schubert completed a full outline for a seventh that he set aside and for some reason never returned to. He then completed the first two movements of a new symphony, which was eventually numbered "8" by musicologists and given the title "Unfinished." There was also a sketch for the third movement of the 8th that Schubert never completed, and a separate overture that musicologists have long suspected was originally intended to be the finale to the 8th. Schubert then composed his great symphony in C Major, now numbered 9 (although it has historically also been numbered 7 or 8). And finally, he completed the piano score for a tenth symphony. His sketchbooks also contain other symphonic fragments.



This set of recordings not only presents Schubert's completed symphonies, but also a remarkable achievement -- the recreation or realization, by musicologist Brian Newbould, of the 7th, the full 8th, and the 10th symphony. These realizations are not, in a strict sense, true authentic works of Schubert, but rather, as Newbould acknowledges, speculative "educated guesses" as to what those symphonies would sound like had they been completed. But they are nonetheless fascinating, and very listenable.



The performances of all tens symphonies, and the symphonic fragments, are solid, as one would expect from Neville Marriner and the Academy. All around, a unique experience."

Schubert put through the Marriner mill -- pleasant but hardl

Santa Fe Listener | Santa Fe, NM USA | 06/06/2010

(3 out of 5 stars)

"At their height in the Seventies and Eighties, the unassuming Academy of St.-Martin-in-the-Fields, based in the famous church on Trafalgar Square, churned out mega hits one after another. They perfectly matched a younger market who wanted to hear classical music in a pleasant, no hassle style, as easily assimilated as granola bars. The level of execution was high, and Neville Marriner had no pretentious to greatness. When you go to the church today, most concerts are drop-in affairs where the audience wears jeans and T-shirts. the Academy's records give off the same vibe. Soon they were billed as "the world's most recorded orchestra," and the appeal of their style is such that the Penguin Guide gives top honors to Marriner's Schubert cycle, praising it over Colin Davis, Gunter Wand, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Karl Boehm, and Karajan.



It's one thing to rub off old shellac but another to take the painting with it. If you begin with Marriner's Unfinished," acknowledged as a masterpiece when Shucbert's early symphonic output was dismissed as juvenilia, the performance perfectly fits Gertrude Stein's scathing description of Chicago: There's o there there. the reading is one uninterrupted span of polite execution with a few climaxes (the music gets louder) but no events. At the other extreme, if you turn to ambitious youthful works like Sym. #1, which need a strong interpretation to make their case, Marriner pushes the score through the same mill and winds up with the same result, a pleasantry. Does this music actually mean anything to him? In the days sixty years ago when Beecham stood up as a rare champion of the Third and Sixth, he found much more than buoyancy and high spirits. Those aren't bad things, naturally, but we've learned to look deeper than that when it comes to Haydn, and the same applies to Schubert.



Musicologist Brian Newbould has undertaken completions of the sketches that Schubert left for various aborted projects, including a lost Sym. #7, the last two movements of the "Unfinished," and the Tenth that the composer never lived to continue with. All are curiosities, but harmless enough -- you can program them out if you want the "Unfinished," for example, to sound the way it was published. Scholarly completeness also supplies three Symphonic Fragments, and Newbould has polished up the markings in the scores of the early works.



I realize that I stand alone among the cheering reviewers here at Amazon, but do a simple A-B comparison. Play Marriner's breezy, carefree reading of the finale to the "Great" C major and then the same movement as interpreted by Furtwangler, Klemperer, Karajan, Bernstein, or Sinopoli. They are by no means look-alikes, but what they all have in common is the sense that masterpieces call for us to delve deep into the realm of emotions, not skate merrily over the surface."