Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra - Symphonies 5 & 8 "Unfinished" [CD]

The fifth of Schubert's nine numbered symphonies was written in 1816 and was performed in October, a month after it's composition, at the house of Otto Hatwig, a violinist in the Burgtheater orchestra. The musicians concerned were otherwise amateurs from the group that had been accustomed to meet at the house of Schubert's father. The music is in the tradition of what Schubert in his diary that year described as the magic sound of Mozart, the immortal. It is scored for flute, pairs of oboes, bassoons and horns, with strings, while the Unfinished Symphony was to make use of a larger orchestra that included clarinets, trombones, trumpets and drums. The first movement leads us through the charm of it's principal melodic material to an excursion into stranger keys, until a recapitulation that opens with the first theme in the key of E fiat, before the original key of the movement is restored. There follows a slow movement that is in that essentially Viennese operatic idiom of which Mozart was the greatest exponent, succeeded by a lively Minuet and Trio in the keys of G minor and G major respectively. The symphony ends with a finale that contains all the dramatic contrasts that the customary form encourages. Rosamunde, Fuerstin von Zypern, was staged at the Theater an der Wien in 1823. The play, by the blue-stocking Helmina von Chezy, was hastily written and was a dramatic disaster, receiving only two performances, it's name remembered only because of the association with Schubert, who, with equal haste, provided music for it. The full score included choral items, which were well enough received by audiences. The Overture was borrowed from an earlier work, Alfonso and Estrella, although the so-called Rosamunde Overture was borrowed from Schubert's opera Die Zauberharfe. It is, however, the entr'acte and ballet music that have won lasting popularity. The Rosamunde theme was used in the following year as a theme for variations in the A minor String Quartet and later re-appeared once more in the B flat Impromptu. The Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra has benefited considerably from the work of it's distinguished conductors. These included Vaclav Talich (1949 -1952), Ludovit Rajter and Ladislav Slovak. The Czech conductor Libor Pesek was appointed resident conductor in 1981, and the present Principal Conductor is the Slovak musician Bystrik Rezucha. Zdenek Kosl.