It is fascinating to approach this recording after having tried to digest that of another baroque star, René Jacobs (Pentatone), exhausting, even sickening, by dint of fatuity. If one evokes the horror of Jacobs to grow Savall, it is because the humility and the deference of Savall in front of the work are opposed in everything to Jacobs and that changes everything. Don’t expect anything in particular from Savall, in any case no “interpretive gesture”. His contribution here is the timbres, the volumes, the balances and the colors (however, you have to get used to old brass…). But Savall does not touch Schubert, that is to say does not shake up architecture. We obviously have here a Big with all the covers, firmly planted, but not brutalized, otherwise Savall could not color it so much. We therefore find the happiness of a tightrope walker such as Brüggen, but in a slightly more rhythmic approach, which may surprise in theunfinished. This album is ideally complementary to Beethoven’s symphonies.
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