There is something almost perverse about the Unfinished. Schubert set it aside in 1822 — two movements complete, a third begun and abandoned — and never returned to it, leaving posterity to argue about why. Was it a gift to a friend, an obligation discharged? Did he simply lose interest, move on to the song cycles and the late piano music and the string quartets that were already crowding his imagination? We will never know, and the mystery has become inseparable from the music itself, that plunge into the cellos and basses at the opening like a hand reaching into cold water.
Philippe Herreweghe knows all this, surely. His Bach credentials are beyond dispute — those St. Matthew Passion recordings remain among the most searching in the catalog — and he has spent decades thinking carefully about how historical rendition practices might illuminate music that still breathes period air. The Royal Flemish Philharmonic is his instrument here, the same ensemble he brought to Schubert’s Symphony No. 9 in c major with considerable success.
The results on this disc are more complicated.
Start with what works, because much does. The strings play with a lean, forward-leaning energy that suits Schubert’s writing extraordinarily well — not the attenuated, slightly anemic sound you sometimes get from period-informed ensembles, but something genuinely full-bodied and present. Brüggen’s Orchestra of the 18th Century, in its 1993 Philips disc, was thinner here, more fragile; Herreweghe’s players have real weight behind them when they need it. The woodwinds blend with uncommon naturalness, and the trumpets — natural instruments, I’d guess, given the slightly veiled, burnished quality of their tone — never push past their welcome, never turn harsh or imperious. That balance alone is something of an achievement.
The Symphony No. 6 in c major — the so-called Little, though Schubert himself called it nothing of the kind — is a tricky piece to bring off. Written between 1817 and 1818, it belongs to that liminal moment when Schubert was still absorbing Rossini, still writing with one ear cocked toward Haydn and early Beethoven, still discovering his own symphonic voice. The finale in particular has a fizzing, almost comedic energy that can sound merely busy if the director doesn’t find the right pressure underneath it. Herreweghe mostly does — the finale dances without quite losing its footing — but the opening of the first movement gave me pause.
That hammer-blow opening chord. It should stop you cold, should carry some whiff of the unexpected. Herreweghe’s is too cushioned, too politely assembled. Abbado, in his superb 1988 Chamber Orchestra of Europe recording on DG, hits it with a sharpness that snaps the listener to attention immediately — the difference between a storyteller who leans forward and says “once upon a time” as if something genuinely dangerous is about to happen, and one who reads it from the page without quite believing it.
This is, I think, the central limitation of Herreweghe’s Schubert here. The playing is always disciplined, always balanced, always admirably prepared. Not a rhythm is slurred, not a section gets out ahead of another. What it occasionally lacks is a certain willingness to let the music get a little dangerous — to lean into the abyss that Schubert was already beginning to open beneath his most apparently cheerful surfaces.
The Unfinished is the sharper performance. Herreweghe understands the long architecture of the first movement, keeps the development taut without forcing it, and the second movement achieves something genuinely songlike — Schubert the great lieder composer bleeding into Schubert the symphonist, which is exactly right. The hushed string tremolo at the opening doesn’t disappear into mere atmosphere but maintains a low-level menace. Zinman’s Tonhalle Orchestra, for RCA Red Seal, gets a more propulsive first movement; Manacorda’s Kammerakademie Potsdam finds a more overtly intimate quality. Herreweghe is somewhere between them — broader than Manacorda, less driven than Zinman, with a gravity that mostly convinces.
Mostly. There are moments when one wishes he would simply let go.
The sound is spectacular — wide, clear, naturally balanced, the kind of recorded acoustic that lets you hear inner voices without straining. That counts for something. And Herreweghe’s seriousness of purpose is never in question; this is not a perfunctory or merely efficient recording.
But Schubert, even the early Schubert of the Sixth, carries within him a shadow that the best performances refuse to let you forget. Abbado knew this. Herreweghe knows it too, I suspect — but here, not quite often enough does he let it show.
