The cellos and basses intoned their short brooding melody; after an interrogative pause the upper strings entered with a ghostly shimmer. Layered on top came a beautifully shaped oboe melody. Thus began Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony, the first item on the third concert of the Staatskapelle Berlin’s Sydney stint. Under Daniel Barenboim’s direction, the first movement was a tense affair: even the major-mode second theme, often a point of blowsy release, was kept under wraps. Particularly marvellous was the mournful duet between violins and violas at the start of the development, which evoked a kind of post-apocalyptic emptiness to begin with but grew inexorably from there. The restraint shown earlier made the points of release feel all the more cathartic, with the Staatskapelle’s trademark fullness of sound making for thrilling climaxes.
The beginning of the famously meandering second movement exhibited easy melodiousness with an entire absence of artifice. The first episode featured an incredibly quiet but somehow still audible clarinet passage, rendering the moments of drama which followed the more shocking against this backdrop. Perhaps it was the absence of anything else in the first half that made the arrival of the interval after the second movement seem premature. Listeners would certainly have been unable to overlook the ‘unfinished’ nature of Schubert’s symphony. There are plenty of two-movement works that form coherent wholes (in Beethoven’s final piano sonata, the fast first movement and slow second movement form a perfect yin-yang pair), but this is not the case with the Unfinished. It is the musical equivalent of the Belvedere torso sculpture – marvellous but incomplete.
After the interval came the Eroica, a work whose completeness and sureness of narrative arc (most often seen as a metaphor for the life, death and eventual resurrection of a hero) was the perfect counterpoise to the Schubert. One could point out dozens of virtues in the Staatskapelle’s performance of the first movement: the clarity and precision of articulation throughout, the thrilling tutti sounds of the orchestra, the brutality of the climax of the development, and so forth. However, as a whole, it left me bitterly disappointed for one simple reason: it felt too slow. This was less a matter of metronome marks and more one of feel.
For me, the first movement needs to embody a striving, forward-moving quality, and from the opening theme it exuded stolidity rather than conveying a sense of momentum. Beethoven was in his early thirties when he wrote this seminal work, not a reckless youth any more but neither had he reached the portals of middle age. The Eroica marked the emergence of the composer’s ‘heroic’ middle period, a decade where his emotional directness and energy blazed a trail that overshadowed symphonic composition for the rest of the century. Barenboim’s rendition of the first movement felt like a tribute to its elevated status, rather than recapturing the revolutionary impetus that fired the composer.