Schubert Symphonies 5 and 6 – Zinman

Somewhere around bar four of the Fifth Symphony’s opening theme, you can tell whether a maestro understands that Schubert was nineteen when he wrote this music — nineteen, unemployed, still living with his exacting schoolmaster father, and yet capable of the kind of melodic ease that Mozart’s ghost might have envied. David Zinman understands it. His Tonhalle players give the opening measures a lift, a spring in the step, that never curdles into cuteness. This is chamber-scaled Schubert, appropriately so: he wrote the symphony for the amateur orchestra that used to convene at the Schubert family home, minus clarinets, trumpets, and drums, an ensemble of friends rather than professionals showing off.

Zinman knows the difference between charm and preciousness. It’s a fine line in this repertoire. The slow movement sings, particularly in the violins, with that quality of inflection that can’t be taught: a hesitation here, a slight leaning into a suspension there. The effect is retrospective, almost autumnal, as though the players already know how this composer’s life will end. That’s a legitimate interpretive choice even if it isn’t the only one. Abbado, with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe back in 1986, finds more coyness in the second theme, more poise, a hair more Viennese elegance if you like, and a little less heart. Where Abbado is quicker off the mark in the outer movements, all bustle and crisp attack, Zinman settles into tempos that let the music breathe and, crucially, let the phrases finish their sentences.

The Minuet, really a scherzo wearing an old-fashioned coat, as so many of Schubert’s are, gets exactly the mood-swings it needs under Zinman: light articulation, sudden shadows, a Trio that sounds like it was written for a village inn rather than a salon. Abbado’s Trio, by contrast, is a bit dressed up, too aware of itself. I’ll take homely.

The finale is where interpreters usually give the game away, because Schubert’s rondo-sonata writing here wants both propulsion and repose, and few conductors manage both. Zinman is unhurried, over a minute slower than Abbado, and some will find him underpowered in the movement’s striving passages, those upward-reaching gestures that Abbado dispatches with more bite. But Zinman’s overall conception holds together better. The development doesn’t feel like a digression. It feels inevitable, subsiding into relaxed musing rather than restless energy for its own sake. This is Schubert as a young man who has already glimpsed Beethoven’s Fifth and Seventh and decided, wisely, not to compete.

The Sixth Symphony is the trickier animal of the two, and conductors have been getting its tone wrong since Schubert’s own lifetime. It’s droll, almost slapstick in places — the finale anticipates Rossini, whom Vienna had gone mad for just as Schubert was composing this piece — but underweight it and the music turns merely trivial; overweight it and you lose the wit entirely. The introduction wants exactly the right balance of gravity and mischief, a joke told with a straight face. Zinman treads that line with evident relish, resisting the temptation, which has sunk lesser recordings, including some starrier ones, to either monumentalize the piece into premature Great C major territory or trivialize it into salon fluff.

Sound engineering from the Tonhalle sessions is clean, unfussy, with good separation of winds against strings: you hear the woodwind conversations Schubert loved to write, oboe answering flute answering clarinet, without the string tone smothering the texture. No excessive resonance, no artificial spotlighting. It sounds like a hall, not a studio trick.

Is this a first choice above all others? Probably not. There are period-instrument accounts (Norrington, Immerseel) that illuminate textures Zinman leaves comfortably blended, and there will always be listeners who prefer Beecham’s old mono charm, wayward as it occasionally is. But among modern-instrument, mid-scale accounts of these two symphonies, Zinman’s belongs near the top of the pile: intelligent, warmly played, unpretentious. Schubert, dead at thirty-one, never got to hear this music played this well. We’re lucky we do.