And so it hasn't been until quite recently that the project was revived as an outlet for expenditure once the right horses have prevailed. In the last year or so, in roughly this order, Mendelssohn, Dvorak, Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven and Schubert have been added to the burgeoning collection in their cute little boxes. Haydn and Mozart were too prolific to expect to be invited in any time soon because the discs do need listening to; Mahler and Bruckner need not raise their hopes too high because I doubt I have world enough or time to indulge myself with them and Shostakovich is rather bigger than I can manage. So, the foray into that particular niche market might have reached a point at which it can rest for them time being.
But it is Harnoncourt's account of Schubert 5 that prompts me to write about what a luxury it is to have them all to hand and what a success the idea has been, finding these long-playing sets often for the price of one new release disc.
As one finds with listening to 16 discs of Chopin over a couple of weeks, one soon becomes attuned to each composer's nuances of style which, for most of the above, amounts to which bits of Beethoven they sound like because the C19th symphony is surely generated by the nine he left us.
Schubert 5 was only vaguely familiar but, like Brahms 4, which was more so, it will be returned to as a place of safe haven and is capable of giving more rather than a diminishing amount on each reprise. Brahms apparently destroyed large amounts of music because he didn't think it lived up to Beethoven's benchmark standard but I think the old boy would have been happy with Brahms 4 if he'd thought of it first, which he might have.
It is not universally accepted in academic circles that Franz Schubert didn't finish his unfinished symphony because 'everything stopped for tea', neither is it generally agreed why he didn't. It's probably not because he died, although of course he did die. Having heard it in full sumptuousness from the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra a few years ago, I was prepared to accept that after two sublime movements, he had nothing good enough to add as third and fourth. But the notes on the Harnoncourt set develop that peremptory conclusion by explaining that the finale was recycled into Rosamunde because there were technical difficulties that couldn't be resolved in trying to forge a satisfactory third movement. D'oh.
Mendelssohn, as I never tire of suggesting, never gets sufficient credit and if the Italian is his best known symphony, it should be for its hypnotic Andante as much as the lively opening, but he offers more in the choral fifth. Schumann is currently struggling to demand his share of attention in this august company although his time will come and Dvorak beyond the spacious theme of the bracing 7th has not created the impression he might have beyond a certain surging and relenting of powerful outbursts on a series that, so far, merge into one. Whereas Beethoven, of course, belongs in a league of his own, not necssarily as an outright personal favourite but as the obvious class act.
So, given time, it is possible to become the person you wanted to be, surveying all your symphony cycles in among the choral music, the concertos, the solo piano, violin or cello, the opera, the mistakes one made and the Albrechtsberger Concertos for Jew's Harp.
And the only reason Berlioz doesn't get a mention is that Symphonie Fantastique doesn't require a box set. But there we are, the symphony, one ends up where one began, back in about 1971, with Mozart 40, and like that 45 rpm single, what goes around comes around.
