Blomstedt's Rosamunde Overture's opening chords boldly announce a sound at once firm and informative, a degree closer than is usual from this source, but with enough ambience from Davies Symphony Hall to aerate the textures. How satisfying it is to register the clean presence and pitch of the orchestra's lower voices, with timpani projected as they might be in a 'period' performance. Concern crept in a little further on about the (unnatural?) relationship between extremely full string basses and the sweet, refined but (let's be honest) rather thin violin tone.
There's no criticizing those strings on grounds of agility; as witness the seemingly effortless articulation of the quavers in the Overture's Allegro. My reaction to their tone, and indeed to the variable level of commitment and insight to be found in this team's Schubert, probably owes it origins to a recent encounter with Gunter Wand's new Unfinished (see above). In this symphony Wand has on his side the deeper, darker hues of the North German Radio Symphony Orchestra (and RCA's more genuine concert-hall perspectives), and both he and Blomstedt take the opening movement at a measured Allegro moderato, but rarely does the San Francisco account communicate anything beyond a moderately scaled, accurate and superbly clear presentation of the notes. By contrast, Blomstedt's second movement (a flowing con moto here) is full of passing wonders—a magically remote four-bar transition on first violins to the second subject; and soulful clarinet and oboe soloists in that second subject appearing from nowhere and dying away with a breath and dynamic control that puts many rivals in the shade.
A reduced San Francisco orchestra completes the disc with an elegant but unsmiling account of the Fifth Symphony. There's nothing here to show that conductor or players feel any special affection for the piece. Tempos are uncontroversial (a moderate range of speeds) and the sound is unimpeachable. The Delos engineering is impeachable: dry and flat, as dead as the Decca is lively, with a strange hollowness surrounding the wind instruments. It is difficult to judge how much this affects reactions to the musical offerings, but on this showing Schwarz is a very earnest Schubertian, and the playing of the New York Chamber Symphony Orchestra seems devoid of both grace and spirit. Tempos in both symphonies produce uniformly sedate results, in fact, a more dispiriting Schubert disc would be hard to find.'