Schubert’s Symphony no. 2 in B flat major is the product of a highly precocious 19-year old composer. From 1808, as a young pupil at the Stadtkonvikt school in Vienna, at some distance from his family, he had become acquainted with the orchestral music of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, but returned home at the end of 1813 to become a schoolteacher like his father. Astonishingly, his Second Symphony, written within a period of three months when he was just 18, was dedicated to Innozenz Lang, who was the director at the Stadtkonvikt.
Conducted in this concert by Franz Welser-Möst, the Tonhalle Orchestra took up this symphony with an aplomb that almost verged on affection. After a vigorous, if not deliberately bombastic start, the lithe strings continued in a marathon of fingerwork. The timpani strike at the end of the movement was just as much a call to attention. At the start of the dreamy second movement, the magical flute (Sabine Poyé Morel) offered variations like those in a simple children’s song; later on, Welser-Most, conducted as if he were making a large chalk drawing.
Michael Reid's fine clarinet playing offered contrast, adding a degree of something hotter and heavier, while in the third movement, the solo oboe (Simon Fuchs) resounded like a lone call in the wilderness, its parry with the flute, being but one of the many golden moments in this performance. Finally, a certain “lightness of being” in the last movement, was complemented by radical contrasts: the tutti making for a multi-faceted, highly-dense sound that included dynamic variations, while the orchestra’s superb horns and woodwinds added a striking element of surprise.
After the interval, Richard Strauss’ voluminous Sinfonia domestica gave us a generous portion of the composer’s life à la casa, one full of animation, trials and delights. Drawing on that unusual vein for orchestral composition, Strauss, then the Kapellmeister of the Berliner Hofoper, took his everyday home-life as inspiration, highlighting his wife, Pauline, in what he coined his singularly novel “musical family portrait”. By all accounts, and as odd as it sounds, Strauss unconditionally treasured his spouse’s cheeky self-confidence, compulsive obsession to clean, and hallmark tactlessness. Described in the programme notes as “whimsical and unbridled”, the work also shows Strauss making liberal citations of other composers before him, always returning to capitalise on his full-bodied orchestration, to say nothing of the amusing characterisations. The fine Tonhalle players pulled out all the stops for Welser-Möst, even humbling those of us in the audience whose aberrations in domestic life are inclined to be less colourful.
