The Berlin Philharmonic launched its own CD label last year with Simon Rattle’s set of the Schumann symphonies. There have been a couple of DVD releases since then (of Peter Sellars’ concert stagings of the Bach Passions), but the audio-only follow-up is this lavish set of Schubert, compiled from concerts in the Philharmonie that Nikolaus Harnoncourt gave with the orchestra between 2003 and 2006.
Harnoncourt’s fine earlier cycle of the Schubert symphonies, made with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 1992, is currently available on four discs at a giveaway price from Warner Classics, so that even for the conductor’s greatest admirers, the new Berlin set, costing nearly four times as much, needs to be pretty special to compete. Four of the discs in this over-designed landscape package are devoted to the eight symphonies (numbered so that the Unfinished is No 7 and the Great C major No 8), while the other four contain two of the masses, in A flat and E flat, and a 2005 concert performance of Schubert’s 1822 opera Alfonso und Estrella, with a lineup that includes Kurt Streit, Dorothea Röschmann and Christian Gerhaher. There’s also a Blu-ray disc containing all the performances captured in “studio master quality”.
There’s no mistaking the quality of the performances themselves, either. Whether you agree with them or not, Harnoncourt’s interpretations are never dull, and over the last 25 years he has often been at his most provocative when he brings his ideas on performing style to traditional symphony orchestras such as the Concertgebouw and Berlin Phil. There are the usual Harnoncourt glosses here, some unnecessary rubato and a few more significant surprises, most notably, perhaps, the very slow tempi that Harnoncourt adopts for the two movements of the Unfinished – which gives the work a weight and grandeur that are almost Brucknerian – and taking more than three minutes longer over the opening Allegro than Abbado does on his Deutsche Grammophon recording with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. In contrast, his tempo for the finale of the Great C major Symphony is wonderfully buoyant, the excitement mounting steadily through it, and there’s a lovely ease to the way in which the Fifth symphony is shaped too, though it is undeniably conceived on a larger-than-life scale.
Harnoncourt’s performances of the masses, with Bernarda Fink and Jonas Kaufmann joining Röschmann and Gerhaher as soloists in the E flat work, unfold with perfect naturalness and plenty of choral grandeur when needed, but he can’t quite work the same magic on Alfonso und Estrella. The dramatic shortcomings that left the three-act romantic opera unperformed in Schubert’s lifetime are hard to get around, and as Alfonso, Kurt Streit doesn’t have quite the tonal warmth he needs. But the rest of the cast is first-rate and there seems to be only one other recording of the opera currently available; whether that’s the added value that makes this set an attractive proposition is another matter.
