According to his website, Andy Stein has a ‘checkered past’ that includes rock, jazz, and playing in the house band for the popular radio show Prairie Home Companion. Nevertheless, Stein’s orchestration of Schubert’s most popular string quartet, using the same forces as his Fourth Symphony, is utterly convincing both stylistically and emotionally. The menacing horns pounding out the rhythm at the end of the first movement, the dark scoring for winds and pizzicato strings at the beginning of the slow movement, and the wind band setting of the third movement trios are a few examples of Stein’s empathetic gifts. JoAnn Faletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic give their all, especially the strings: the demonic whirlwind of the last movement tarantella is as colorful and vigorous as the finest quartet performance.

Andy Stein created this adaptation of one of Schubert’s best-known chamber works, a string quartet based on his song, “Death and the Maiden.” The story is an old European myth where Death demands to spend a night with a bride-to-be. If she refuses, her fiance will die on their wedding day.

This classic quartet is really more a tone poem as it paints this dramatic story. For the symphonic version, Andy Stein sticks with the composer’s original key of D minor, which Schubert often used to express dark, shadowy themes.

In the opening movement, Death makes its harsh proposition. The drama is intensified by Stein’s use of four French horns, the same choice made by Schubert for his “Tragic” Symphony No. 4 in C minor.

“I have tried to create a late classical/early Romantic symphony out of this great chamber work,” Andy Stein said, “so that it perhaps would sound as if Schubert himself had conceived it in this form.”

A haunting pulse signifies the death chant in the second movement, marked Andante con moto. Five variations are heard in the key of G minor. Not until the fourth variation do we hear a key change to G major, which quickly reverts back to its gloomy mood.

Gustav Mahler arranged this string quartet for string orchestra in 1901. Andy Stein’s arrangement is radically different from that rendition as he makes use of the customary woodwind section, with four horns, two trumpets and timpani, as well as strings. The flute, clarinet and cello solos in this movement demonstrate that the members of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra are also fine solo artists.
It was not uncommon for composers of earlier centuries to create different arrangements of their works. I think Schubert would be quite pleased with what Andy Stein, JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra have done to bring this new adaptation to life.

Franz Schubert died at age 31. A mystery has shrouded his “Unfinished” Symphony, No. 8 in B Minor, ever since. Research has shed new light on the composer’s intentions for a third and fourth movement for this symphony.

We now know Schubert had fully sketched the third movement for piano. He also wrote 20 measures for full orchestra. Using these newly discovered materials, British scholar Brian Newbould, who for many years served as president of the Schubert Institute, completed the energetic Scherzo.

The source for the last movement is the incidental music Schubert wrote for the play, “Rosamunde, Princess of Cypress.” It’s thought that Schubert, who was desperate for money, set aside his “Unfinished” symphony to compose music for the play.

Scholars now believe the “Entr’acte” in “Rosamunde,” was originally intended as the finale to the “Unfinished” symphony. Swiss conductor Mario Venzago reworked segments from “Rosamunde” to create the electrifying final movement heard here.

When I see JoAnn Falletta’s name on a new recording I immediately gravitate toward it. I know it will be a high quality performance, with carefully chosen repertoire that will probably introduce me to music that’s new and worthwhile.

JoAnn Falletta is a tastemaker, and her new recording of these expanded versions of two of Schubert’s great masterpieces is another special treat music lovers will want to add to their music collection.

The completion of Schubert’s famous “Unfinished” is the one by Brain Newbould. Many historians think that Schubert did indeed intend to complete this work—despite a hundred years of justifying its two-movement structure—because the composer became ill and had started 20-odd scored measures of a scherzo. Newbould completes this movement in fine fashion, though I doubt anyone would suggest that this effort in any way surpasses what the composer would have done. The last movement is taken from the Entr’acte from the incidental music for Rosamunde, something some scholars think may have been intended as the finale for this symphony—though this remains speculative—as the music was written right after Schubert set aside the work, and is also in B-minor…Falletta is a superb conductor on any front, and Naxos has captured the BPO’s sound very well in an upfront and vivid recording. Recommended for creative programming and excellent performances.

JoAnn Falleta draws polished playing from the Buffalo Philharmonic, specially impressive for wind solos, but this is an account of the first movements that lacks the mystery that this B minor work can regularly conjure up, admirable as the playing is. When it comes to the added movements, it has to be admitted that they do not match very happily. The result is a fascinating exercise without being a work that deserves to be brought into the regular repertory. The Unfinished as it stands certainly wins the test of time.

Listening to the genuine Schubert of those two first movements after the Death and the Maiden orchestration brings home the difference between real and imitation Schubert. The orchestration of Andy Stem is vigorous and is convincingly played, but it is coarse next to the symphony. The use of woodwind solos is not always successful, and the device of using different wind sections in a block Brucknerian way is hardly convincing. Yet, as I say, it makes for a lively experience, and provides a generous coupling for the completed Symphony No 8. Good, clean sound.

Less successful—or, at least, less satisfying—is the completed version of the Unfinished Symphony, perhaps because our familiarity with the original makes it virtually impossible to listen objectively to any additions. Over the past 140 years there have been countless attempts to complete the work. This version has a reconstruction of the Scherzo—based on Schubert’s own sketches—by the English Schubert scholar Brian Newbould, together with a Finale assembled by the Swiss conductor Mario Venzago which combines extracts from Schubert’s Rosamunde incidental music with the same work’s Entr’acte, which some historians believe may have been intended as the original Finale for the symphony. It’s an impressive and credible attempt at doing the impossible perhaps, but fails to address the fundamental question with projects like this—“Why even try?”

Apparently recorded live in concert, the BPO and Falletta deliver performances full of passion and conviction.

My money is on Death and the Maiden, adapted here as a Symphony in D Minor. There are no gimmicks in Stein’s orchestration. He uses a standard woodwind octet with four horns, two trumpets and tympani in ways that enhance the music on the symphonic plane, much as a master orchestrator of Schubert’s era, say Felix Mendelssohn, might have done. In particular, he frequently uses the flutes to parallel the strings in the melodic passages, and he employs  brass and percussion sparingly but with great effect in the climactic moment near the end of the second movement, an Andante con moto in the form of a theme-and-variations. Here the music swells to greater intensity as it reaches a triumphant G Major. We hear the brass again used to good effect in the peroration just prior to the splendid fugal passage that begins the thrilling Pesto conclusion to the final movement. The strings carry the burden throughout, as they should do in a symphony adapted from a string quartet, with the winds adding distinctive color, as in the imitation post-horn calls that we hear at critical moments in the Andante.

I’m less sanguine about the completion of the “Unfinished” Symphony, which I’ve always regarded as one of music’s most completely satisfying experiences in the form of the two movements we usually hear. That’s because the two compliment each other perfectly, the Andante attempting to answer the deep, emotionally charged questions posed by the opening Allegro movement. It does not answer them completely, of course, because the great questions of life, such as why pain and suffering could conceivably exist in any sort of divine plan, are really unanswerable. But the struggle (note the striking mid-movement forte in the Andante) is a noble one, and Schubert provides some measure of solace at the end, even if it is peace bought by the emotional exhaustion of the struggle.

At this point, you could make a good case that Schubert has already said all there was to say and that the “Unfinished” Symphony was in fact complete. But Newbould goes on to build a Scherzo from fragments in Schubert’s notebooks (consisting of piano sketches and some 20 measures in full score) and Venzago adds his edited version of the well known Entr’acte No. 1 from the composer’s Incidental Music to Rosamunde for a finale. All of which provides a plausible “completion” of the work as a standard classical symphony in four movements, if that is what one really wants. Perhaps the most most revealing clue to the mystery is Schubert’s own disinclination to complete the symphony as such even though he wrote it as we now know it in 1822 and enjoyed six more years of reasonably good health before he experienced a disastrous decline in the last summer of his life.

If what you really want is the “Unfinished” Symphony as we usually hear it, you can always use your remote to click off at the end of Track 6. You will not be disappointed with this account, as JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo keep things moving right along in a taut, exciting performance that compares well with the best accounts on record. The Allegro and the Andante together clock in at a combined 21:00, which is among the briefest on record. But Falletta’s pacing is so expert that we have no impression anywhere of undue haste, and she broadens the tempo for expressive purposes at all the right places. This was the first opportunity I’ve had to hear this conductor and orchestra, and it whetted my appetite to hear more of them in the future.