Harnoncourt sees the confrontation of the dancelike vitality with the sense of grief and ever-present nearness of death, a reflection of the so-called Viennese 'joie de vivre' at the edge of the grave, as the principal expressive level in Schubert's music. Needless to say, Harnoncourt's insightful style, the incisive combination of timbres and vibrant textural analysis of the music, and above all his understanding of Schubert's particular Viennese lyricism, remain in a class of their own.
The trouble, so to speak, for this new Schubert edition is that Nikolaus Harnoncourt already left us an outstanding, hard-to-beat Schubert Symphonies cycle with the Royal Concertgebouw Amsterdam back in 1992 (on Warner/Teldec, now available as a bargain box-set of four CDs). A 104-page book (in German and English) guides the listener through the music with articles, commentary from Harnoncourt, and the libretto of the opera and the masses texts.
The box also offers a code for free download of the high resolution audio files of the whole edition and a seven-day ticket for the Digital Concert Hall, the Berliner's video streaming venue. The Blu-ray disc contains all the music in PCM 2.0 Stereo 24-bit/48kHz as well as in 5.0 DTS-HD Master Audio (24-bit/48kHz), plus a 38-minute interview with the conductor (from 2014) about his passion for Schubert and his work with the Berliner. (The discs are available separately as well for download on Qobuz in Studio Master quality and on iTunes and Amazon in low-res AAC and MP3.) Recorded in concerts at the Berliner Philharmonie between 20 and spread over eight CDs and one Blu-ray disc, this deluxe edition arrives in a lavish box, designed like last year's Schumann/Rattle cycle from BPHR as a beautiful but hard-to-store landscape-sized book. To mark Nikolaus Harnoncourt's 85 th birthday, as much as the successful cooperation between the Austrian conductor and the Berlin Philharmonic during some 25 years, Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings (BPHR), the orchestra's own label, releases a monumental Schubert box-set, including all the symphonies, two late Masses and the virtually unknown opera Alfonso und Estrella.
0 kommentar(er)
