Schubert: Unfinished and Great Symphony

For much of his illustrious career as both a countertenor and conductor, René Jacobs has focused on Baroque music, with acclaimed recordings of Handel, Bach, and Monteverdi to his credit. In recent years, however, albums of Mozart and Beethoven have signalled his growing interest in the Classical and early Romantic periods. Schubert is Jacobs’ latest preoccupation, and his new recording coupling the Unfinished (Symphony No. 8) with The Great (Symphony No. 9) is the final instalment in a complete, four-album survey of the composer’s symphonies. The symphonies may be new studio territory, but for Jacobs, Schubert is anything but a recent discovery. “My first love was Schubert,” he explains, “because at home, we had recordings of his songs by the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. And as a boy soprano, I had a good voice and already sang Schubert’s songs very often.” Schubert, he says, has suffered from his classification as mainly a superb composer of songs. “But he is also a very good composer of symphonies,” says Jacobs. “I consider Schubert, with Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, as the fourth great classical symphony composer.” When the opportunity arose to record a complete Schubert symphony cycle for the Pentatone label, Jacobs naturally jumped at it. “I had been moving towards symphonic repertoire with Mozart and Haydn anyway,” he says. “Doing Schubert next made sense.” Jacobs’ performances of the two works on this album are remarkably fresh and colourful, with life and vibrancy in every bar. He gives much of the credit for this to the B’Rock Orchestra, a Belgian ensemble which plays on historical instruments. “The good thing about playing these symphonies with orchestras that come from early music is that you can rediscover the compositions as if they were new,” Jacobs explains. That sense of rediscovery comes from the rawer, more immediate sound that historical instruments make, compared to the smoother textures of a modern symphony orchestra. Jacobs, a Belgian himself, speaks warmly of the sense of humour the B’Rock Orchestra brought to the Schubert recording sessions, an exuberance which shines through particularly in the “Scherzo” and “Finale” of the The Great. Many of the players, as Baroque specialists, had not played Schubert before, adding an extra edge of enthusiasm to the performances. “For them, it was a new experience, and so we tried to make the symphonies sound new, too,” Jacobs adds. Jacobs views both symphonies as a natural pairing, with one intimately linked to the other psychologically. The Unfinished was, he believes, deliberately left incomplete after Schubert had written just two movements. He cites as evidence Mein Traum (“My Dream”), a two-part autobiographical narration written by Schubert around the same time as the symphony. A tale of death, loss and eventual reconciliation, Mein Traum closely matches the emotional arc of the Unfinished, and a recording of it is included on the new album. If the Unfinished is a world of intense recovered memories, Jacobs argues, then The Great is a reaction and release, brimming with fertile creativity and joyful energies—a symphony of “heavenly length”, as Schubert’s fellow composer Robert Schumann put it. Collaborating with the B’Rock Orchestra has, Jacobs says, helped recreate the extraordinarily luminous, at times startling soundworld Schubert conjured in these last two symphonies. “If you use historical instruments, the music sounds more adventurous because the instruments themselves were, technically, more difficult to play in Schubert’s period,” Jacobs explains. “Later, when changes in design—valves for the horns, for instance—made the instruments easier to play, the music somehow sounds more comfortable and less dangerous. And music should be dangerous.”