When Karl Bohm’s 1963-71 Berlin Schubert cycle was first gathered together in a five-LP box in 1973, Trevor Harvey had no difficulty squaring his opinion of the set with those of his colleagues who had reviewed the individual discs. As he put it, ‘Nobody dissented from the view that these are marvellous performances.’ They are, indeed, marvellous performances: vibrant, clear, characterful and effortlessly well played. The recordings, too, still seem new-minted, even the Ninth, the first of the symphonies to be recorded.
Ethel Smyth wrote of Schubert’s music as a crystal stream that goes on welling for ever and ever. This is precisely the sense of it we have from Bohm and the Berliners. Theirs is the art that disguises art. As Trevor Harvey noted, Bohm ‘never feels the need to do anything clever but just quietly sees to it that this superb orchestra plays at its best’. He cited the famous cello theme at the start of the Unfinished Symphony where the Berlin cellos ‘don’t enjoy their tune too much to play it really softly’.
Bohm’s way with the two late symphonies is, in fact, highly sophisticated. The Unfinished begins in what seems to be a leisurely fashion but his performance of the first movement catches Schubert’s mix of lyricism and high drama with extraordinary acuity. Conversely, the second movement seems swift but brings the work full circle with an equally extraordinary sense of calm and catharsis in the final pages. The celebrated 1963 Ninth out-Furtwanglers Furtwangler in the myriad means it uses within a single grand design to capture the symphony’s sense of danger and derring-do in addition to its lyricism, nobility, and earthy Austrian charm.
In the early symphonies, Bohm’s approach is simpler-seeming and more direct. Rhythms are so finely propelled, the pulse so effortlessly sustained, the music always lands on its feet. The zest comes from the stylish Berlin string-playing; melodically, it is the woodwinds (every one a Lieder singer, as Michael Oliver aptly observed) who catch the beauty of Schubert’s melodies and the skirl of the attendant descants. The only movement that disappointed me was the first movement of the Fourth Symphony where the music’s demonic aspect is entirely ignored (as is the exposition repeat).
There was always much to enjoy in the two rival sets (both now on a series of budget-price double-CD albums) from the late 1960s. Menuhin’s performances had a wonderful al fresco feel to them, despite some slightly rickety playing; Sawallisch’s Dresden set is stylish and superbly drilled – a little too drilled in places. Bohm has the best of both worlds. Of the much more expensive recent cycles, the Abbado is by some distance the preferred choice, ahead of Davis and Harnoncourt, whose Royal Concertgebouw set, as Jonathan Swain observed, is full of irritating oddities which pall on repeated hearing – the very reverse of Bohm, who ensures that the Schubertian stream is always clear to the eye and sweet to the taste