Editor’s Choice – Orchestral, October 2015

When I spoke to Nikolaus Harnoncourt about his new Schubert set for Limelight’s August issue, one thing was made clear from the get-go: the prevailing wisdom that the truly superlative Schubert symphonies are the Unfinished and the Great needs to be questioned. “Already his own style is in place from the first movement of the First Symphony,” Harnoncourt told me. And the conducting bears out those bold sentiments.

Harnoncourt’s idea of a ‘Schubert style’ runs contrary to deeply held ‘certainties’, while remaining stubbornly rooted in the notes. The First Symphony is revealed as the work of an enfant terrible, a cocky young composer fully-versed in the lessons of Beethoven; stinging dissonances disrupt what might otherwise be smooth harmonic pathways. That opening movement is taken at a high-velocity tempo, Harnoncourt daring momentum to buckle when the harmony is at its most disobedient.

And having comprehensively demolished the misnomer that his earliest symphonies might be pallid re-makes of Mozart and Haydn, Harnoncourt aims to change hearts and minds about Schubert’s middle and late-period symphonies. His earlier cycle, recorded in 1992 with the Concertgebouw, balances...