Schubert Complete Symphonies – Maazel

Lorin Maazel does not much resemble the genial Viennese uncle we have come to expect in this repertoire, and thank goodness for that, mostly.

This budget reissue — recorded live with the Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, and cheap enough to justify the gamble — gathers all eight symphonies onto three discs, using the corrected numbering scholars settled on some decades back. The Great C major, long known as the Ninth, is now officially the Eighth and last; the symphony we call the Unfinished slides down to seventh place. Bureaucratic housekeeping, yes, but it matters, because it reorders how we hear Schubert’s arc — from a teenager cribbing Haydn’s manners to a dying man reaching, in his final year, for something almost Beethovenian in scale and ambition.

Maazel’s instinct throughout is toward tautness. Tempos are urgent, phrasing clipped at the edges, climaxes hit rather than caressed. This is Schubert with his necktie on straight. Those who grew up on Beecham’s beloved mono-into-stereo cycle — all charm, all twinkle, phrased as if Sir Thomas were leaning across a dinner table sharing a joke — will feel something has gone missing. Wit, mostly. And a certain amiable slackness that, paradoxically, let the music breathe.

The early symphonies survive this treatment rather well, actually. Nobody claims the First or Second is a lost masterpiece — the melodic invention occasionally wanders toward the generic, the forms borrowed wholesale from Haydn and early Beethoven — but Maazel’s brisk management of the triple-time dance episodes gives them a spring in the step that some starchier accounts lack. The finale of the First, an Allegro vivace of real teenage swagger, spills over almost bodily into the opening pages of the Second; you begin to wonder whether young Mendelssohn had a score tucked under his arm. The Andante of the Second has a homespun, fireside cosiness, and the Presto vivace finale goes by in a blur of good humor, crisply articulated woodwind chattering away underneath.

It’s in the Third and Fourth where I start arguing with the conductor.

Beecham’s 1958–59 release of the Third remains, for me, close to unimprovable — those knowing little hesitations before a phrase resolves, the light-footed sense of comedy in the Menuetto, an opening Adagio maestoso shaped with real architectural patience. Maazel, by contrast, plants heavy timpani strokes on the downbeat of the Allegretto and drives the outer movements hard, giving the whole symphony a gravity it was probably never meant to carry. It’s a legitimate reading. I’m just not sure it’s a persuasive one. Even with hiss and the occasional constricted string tone, I kept returning to the old EMI recording and hearing more light, more shade, more actual delight.

The Tragic Fourth suits this maestro’s temperament rather better — small wonder, since the symphony wants gravitas, and Maazel supplies plenty, the C minor churning with real Sturm und Drang urgency, brass biting into the sforzandi. The Fifth, that most Mozartean of Schubert’s essays, comes off more mixed; there’s less air in the phrasing than I’d like, though the orchestra’s playing is immaculate — the horns especially, warm and rounded, sitting beautifully inside an acoustic that leans a touch fat and boomy but never smothers detail.

Disc three is where the set earns its keep. The Unfinished is dark, unsentimental, moving at a steady tread rather than lingering over its famous melancholy. Some will miss the last ounce of Viennese sweetness, but the strings dig into that opening cello-and-bass murmur with real weight, and the second subject, when the winds take it up, has an ache to it that never curdles into schmaltz.

The Great C major, though — this is the interpretation that justifies the whole box. Maazel finds the “heavenly length” Schumann diagnosed and, rather than fighting it, rides it, building the first movement’s introduction with real inevitability, letting the finale’s obsessive repeated rhythms accumulate a nearly manic energy without ever losing ensemble discipline. The Bavarian orchestra plays superbly — trombones dark and covered, never blaring, string tone silvery rather than plush.

Audience noise: virtually none. Balances throughout are exemplary, the kind of instrumental transparency that lets you hear inner voices Beecham sometimes buried.

So: a mixed verdict, but an honest one. Nobody replaces Beecham for charm, and nobody should try to replace Böhm for aristocratic poise, or Harnoncourt for sheer interpretive daring. But as a single, modestly priced traversal of the whole cycle, intelligently played and vividly recorded, this Maazel set holds its own — occasionally brilliant, occasionally merely efficient, never dull. For the Great alone, it earns a place on the shelf.