Schubert Transfiguration: Symphonies Nos. 8 & 9 (SACD review)

Symphony No. 8 “Unfinished”; Symphony No. 9 “The Great.” Jordi Savall, Le Concert des Nations. AliaVox AVSA9950

By John J. Puccio

The year 2022 must have been the year of Schubert, with at least three major sets of the composer’s Symphonies Nos. 8 and 9 appearing, one from Herbert Blomstedt and the Gewandhaus Orchestra (DG), another from Rene Jacobs and the B’Rock Orchestra (Pentatone), and this newest and best one of all from Jordi Savall and Le Concert des Nations (AliaVox). Such extraordinary attention couldn’t happen to a nicer composer.

Maestro Savall has been around for a long time, making beautiful music with several different period-instrument bands. He is very good at it, and his Concert des Nations is probably his best ensemble yet. They play with an ardent finesse, and Savall ensures that they follow historically informed performance practices as well as anyone. For me, the culmination of Savall’s work came with his recent release of the complete Beethoven symphonies, which taken as a set I found was as good as anything I’d ever heard. So it was with great anticipation that I awaited these new Schubert discs, and I was not disappointed.

OK, here are a few things you should already know about the symphonies. Austrian composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828) began writing his Symphony No. 8 in B minor, D. 759 in 1822 but stopped after two movements. He left a scherzo nearly completed for piano, but with little orchestration. No one is sure why he quit the piece only halfway through, but they’re lovely movements and have given rise to the work’s being called Schubert’s “Unfinished.” Certainly, they are among the most melodic, lyrical, and tuneful movements in the classical repertoire, and maybe that’s good enough.

Maestro Savall is one of the few conductors of historically informed performances who seems to genuinely love the music he’s performing. Another such conductor is Nick McGegan, who seems positively to dance while on the podium. I’ve never seen Jordi Savall conduct live so I’m not sure about his dance steps, but I can only imagine his liveliness in front of an orchestra. He appears to communicate this enthusiasm to the orchestra, too, which plays with a crisp vigor, something not all of Savall’s ensembles have displayed in the past. Needless to say, the Eighth comes off with a splendid dynamism while maintaining Schubert’s endearing melodic lines. Moreover, there is never any sense that there is anything missing, that something more should come. Savall manages to make the “Unfinished” sound, well, finished.

Schubert wrote his Symphony No. 9 in D major “The Great” D 944 somewhere between 1825 and his death in 1828. However, he never heard it performed as he wrote it. Like most of his music, the Ninth never saw publication until well after the composer’s death. Schubert was unable to pay an orchestra to perform it, and the ones he did submit it to refused to play it, claiming it was too long and too difficult to undertake. (Robert Schumann would come to the symphony’s rescue some ten years after the composer’s death when Schubert’s brother Ferdinand gave him the manuscript, and Felix Mendelssohn would conduct the symphony for the first time with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra in 1839.)

Whatever, the symphony’s structure is fairly conventional: I. Andante – Allegro ma non troppo - Piu mosso; II. Andante con moto; III. Scherzo Allegro vivace - Trio - Scherzo da capo; and IV. Allegro vivace. However, as I mentioned, its length was quite long by the standards of the day. Robert Schumann called it a “heavenly length,” yet early musicians found it challenging to play because of its extended string and woodwind parts.

Savall beefed up his Concert des Nations with additional young players from a l’ Academie Schubert to approximate the numbers the composer intended for these productions. They are especially welcome in the Ninth, helping to punctuate the “Great” in the work’s subtitle.

Schubert wrote that “my works are the fruit of my musical knowledge and my pain.” It is for this inward-looking quality of Schubert’s music that Savall calls his present set “Transfiguration.” He sees Schubert’s music as a major refashioning of Beethoven, a metamorphosis of sorts, based on Schubert’s reaction to his own ill health. Maybe. Savall certainly makes the most of the Ninth’s varying moods, from the symphony’s magisterial opening to the second movement’s almost jaunty funeral march to the work’s spirited, dance-like Scherzo and on to the vibrant, passionate, heartstruck finale.

I obviously can’t speak for every listener, but I can say without doubt that for me Savall’s renditions of Schubert’s Eighth and Ninth Symphonies are the best I have yet heard on period instruments and possibly the best I am likely to hear for some time.

Producer and engineer Manuel Mohino recorded the symphonies for hybrid SACD playback at A La Collegiale de Cardona, Catalogne, Spain in September 2021. AliaVox chose to make the discs in hybrid SACD multichannel and stereo, depending on the equipment used for playback. I listened in SACD two-channel stereo.

Like Savall’s Beethoven set, recorded in the same venue, the sound in the Schubert symphonies is smooth, spacious, wide-ranging, dynamic, well balanced, and well defined. It is, in fact, about as good as one could want. It is among the most-realistic sound you’ll find in this repertoire, so you really can’t do any better.