Schubert - Symphony 5 [Blomstedt-San Francisco Symphony]Only a couple of weeks ago i was talking about the Eighth Symphony on this disc [22nd November 2010], now it's the turn of the Fifth, whereas the Eighth is a serious and maybe ominous symphony, the Fifth by comparison is sunny and fun, it's very much been compared to Mendelssohn's Fourth, or a lot of high spirited Haydn Symphonies, certainly it's out of sorts for Schubert, that even though he had a dance element to his compositions, usually death or love's rejection wasn't far away, and especially the first movement of this work, it just doesn't sound like Schubert, too baroque in some ways, a great invention nonetheless.
As i've said before, Herbert Blomstedt is Swedish, he recorded the Fifth in 1990, and the booklet cover seems to have all the four major colours of the spectrum, blue, green, yellow, and red, in some brilliant deep colours, a lovely pic.
The first movement always gets me, straight from the start it has a fizz about it, the flute takes a lead role, it actually starts the symphony [0:00-0:04], and also has a nice part early on in embellishing the main theme [0:26-0:29] which returns again and again, but it's those fizzy strings / violins [0:05+], with their backing strings / cellos & basses that echo the violins one second later, that are the real stars, it's a melody to die for, and it has an incredible ebullient forward momentum about it, it never seems to let up, this opening theme comes back twice more [1:59+ & 4:52+], even though the last time some variations start to happen, i don't know really why this hits the spot with me, it's a tune that just stands out of the ordinary, it just seems to hit the stride of my heart / soul perfectly i guess.
Here's Gunter Wand conducting the first movement on YouTube.
