The combination of subtlety and straightforwardness that springs out of each of Schubert’s symphonies has never been matched. That starts with the composer’s first - a strikingly assured piece of work by a 16-year-old Schubert who has the capabilities of the orchestra and the engineering of a symphony well under his belt. Schubert’s liberated, tuneful music appears always to be telling a story and this early work from one of music’s first true romantics is no exception, despite its bittersweet ambiguity.
Jan Willem de Vriend returns to Bergen to conduct the symphony here alongside music by a composer on whose shoulders Schubert stood. Dejan Lazic is the soloist in Mozart’s graceful and intimate Piano Concerto No 12, before which we hear an intriguing rarity: a performance of the only theatre incidental music Mozart wrote, his tense and dramatic music for the five-act play Thamos, King of Egypt.