The orchestra's sound production was totally unforced in the superb Wolkenturm acoustics, with its warm, powerful, slightly tubby bass, and the beautifully in tune if carefully-plotted cello and double bass pizzicatos. Given the post-pandemic climate and the conductor's gravity, Blomstedt might have almost come to a grand pause during the repeat, but in doing so he seemed to have been both affected by – and speaking to – many of eternal issues of the heart and soul that have sprung up during the time of covid. He took a comfortable strolling tempo for the Allegro con moderato, paying special attention to introductory and transitional passages, with lots of light, subtle colors and long-lined phrasing. In fact, the speeds Blomstedt took for Schubert's “Unfinished” Symphony were similar to his recording with the San Francisco Symphony in the mid 1990s. And while the same qualities which had been evident the Sunday before, when he and the VPO had played Honegger and Brahms at the Salzburg Festival, it had been less physically exuberant in the more claustrophobic, if more glamorous, confines of the Großes Festspielhaus, and so it was a pleasure to hear them in the open spaces of Grafenegg's Wolkenturm where the conductor's lapidarian concerns were folded into a deeply-invested nonagenarian's view of music he has been performing for nearly seven decades.
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