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Schoenburg
Gurrelieder

 
 
Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor

2 CD / SACD Hybrid Set

 

The Independent ****

How fitting that the opening concert of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia series 'City of Dreams: Vienna 1900-1935' should conclude with the mightiest wake-up call in all music ... Part two’s “Wild Hunt” rose from muted Wagner tubas (the eeriest sound in music) to the all bones and chain rattling rampage of the undead (Schoenberg’s surreal take on the summoning of the vassals from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung) to vivid effect while the “Klaus, the Jester” episode - Schoenberg’s scoring at its most fantastical - was despatched with great virtuosity.

Edward Seckerson

The Sunday Times

'Vienna - City of Dreams'... looks set to be one of the musical highlights of 2009 if Esa-Pekka Salonen’s sensational account of Schoenberg’s seminal Gurrelieder at the Festival Hall last weekend proves typical. ... It was a brilliant, bold and generous masterstroke to open the festivities with Schoenberg’s song-symphonic epic, Gurrelieder ... Salonen charts Schoenberg’s journey from darkness to light, from Romanticism to modernism, with an unerring command of his vast forces ... he achieves an impressionistic transparency in Schoenberg’s lighter-scored pages, suggesting the influence of Debussy.

Hugh Canning

The Evening Standard

What better way to launch such an endeavour than with Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder ... Part 1 is really a succession of love songs and Salonen did well not to let the lid off too soon. Holding something in reserve for the Wild Hunt and the glorious Hymn to the Sun of Part 3 - terrific contributions from Simon Halsey’s City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and Philharmonia Voices - he brought this extravagant manifestation of late Romanticism to a suitably blazing climax.

Barry Millington

The Financial Times

The opening songs had a featherweight transparency, the interludes a natural fluency, so that when the big moments arrived, they resembled a culmination, an organic development, of all that had gone before. The Philharmonia played as if the music really mattered, with beautifully moulded textures and impeccable attacks.

Andrew Clark

The Independent ****

Dramatically realised here by the Philharmonia under Esa-Pekka Salonen, Gurrelieder is a fascinating work which illuminates the development of Schoenberg's compositional style.

It starts out as a song-cycle and expands to operatic scope, its suitably Wagnerian theme – the dalliances and downfall of the mighty – realised by a gigantic orchestra incorporating six vocal soloists and three choirs of four sections apiece. Written in 1900, the Prelude and First Part are lushly Romantic in manner, but the final section, written 11 years later, is markedly different in style, the doomed hero's repeated pell-mell ride of death animated by startling instrumental colouration.

Andy Gill

MusicalPointers.co.uk

Invading one's own home with decibels to shake the walls, Gurrelieder is a monstrosity, its disparate parts so incongruous that many another composer might have withdrawn such a youthful folly. I suppose one ought to hear it every decade or so, but for me this was the last time. I cannot get on with the "love story", as vague and incorporeal as Wagner's for Tristan and Isolde, and I was keen for Part 1 to be over.

Part 2 has quite a lot going for it from the developing composer; I liked best the song about the Eel etc, well put over by Andreas Conrad as Klaus the Jester; and the Melodrama is worth hearing as a precursor to Pierrot Lunaire, though the impressively convincing recorded balance between soloists and orchestra seems vitiated here by the Speaker's microphone; surely anachronistic (premiered 1913) - but without it I guess she couldn't have been heard much at The Barbican.

I accept the plaudits for the heroic singing of Stig Andersen, supported by Soile Isokoski and Monica Group; for the chorus and orchestra and for Salonen's melding of all the disparate parts, but despite Julian Johnson's explanation how the "romantic and modern are two sides of the same coin - - - ", I cannot recommend its introduction to smaller homes that are not insulated from the neighbours.

All these discs are supplied by Signum with clear, large black-on-white texts and notes and their presentation is to be applauded; so too the variety of choice in one month.

Peter Grahame Wolfe

The Financial Times

The Philharmonia Orchestra’s “Vienna: City of Dreams” festival ends next Thursday with a semi-staged Wozzeck, but its enduring legacy will be this recording of the opening concert in February. Schoenberg’s sprawling cantata symbolises the bridge between romanticism and modernism on which Vienna was poised a century ago. Its impact depends on the conductor’s ability to weld disparate elements into a coherent whole. Buoyed by his experience of Tristan und Isolde in Los Angeles, Salonen does so brilliantly. The opening songs have a featherweight transparency, the interludes a natural fluency, so that when the big moments arrive, they represent a crowning of all that has come before. Monica Groop is the riveting Waldtaube, Barbara Sikova an impressively musical Speaker, and the choral climax transmits a properly ecstatic, pantheistic glow.

Andrew Clark

The Guardian ****

This was taped live at London’s Royal Festival Hall last February, at the start of Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia’s massive examination of Viennese modernism. Many considered it epoch-making at the time. That it doesn’t quite work on disc is owing to the recording, which finely balances orchestra and choirs, but places the soloists so close that it emphasises vocal imperfections at the expense of power and beauty. Stig Andersen’s unsteady Waldemar and Monica Groop’s tragic, if raw-sounding, Wood Dove are more detrimentally affected than Soile Isokoski’s ecstatic Tove, so you need to make some allowances in the first section – particularly since Salonen’s approach to the opening love songs is notably restrained. Once we’re past the halfway mark and all hell is literally breaking loose, the performance becomes more gripping, with some electrifying choral singing, and playing as passionate as it is detailed. The narrator, more satisfactorily recorded than the other soloists, is the great German actor Barbara Sukowa, and as a consequence, the climactic Wild Hunt of the Summer Wind is about as heart-rending as it can possibly get.

Tim Ashley 

The Sunday Times ****

This recording comes from Salonen’s recent City of Dreams series with the Philharmonia Orchestra, devoted to the music of decay and stumbling regeneration produced in Vienna in the early 20th century. Gurrelieder is a gigantic post-Wagnerian hybrid relating the illicit love of Waldemar and Tove, Waldemar’s torment after Tove’s death and the apotheosis of their reunion as the spring renews the earthly world. This is a voluptuous, feverish and thrilling performance, characterised also by the clarity of vision and texture that have always been Salonen’s hallmarks.

Stephen Pettitt

Classic FM Magazine
*****

By the time Gurrelieder premiered in 1913, Schoenberg was creating the atonal masterworks that would make him the 20th-century’s most controversial composer. But Gurrelieder, completed in 1911, was his compositional farewell to the opulent 19th-century Romanticism through which he had learnt his craft. Scored for monolithic orchestral and choral forces, the piece portrays the fated love story of Waldemar and Tove. Salonen cracks into Schoenberg’s stacked layers of activity and strikingly schizophrenic mood shifts, revealing clarity and sonic grandeur. His soloists are top-notch too. Essential listening.

Amazon.com, (Customer Review), November 2009

Arnold Schönberg's symphonic/operatic/song cycle/cantata GURRELIEDER, composed between 1900 -1911, is one of the greatest homages to the era of Romanticism that many felt was crowned by Richard Wagner's 'Tristan und Isolde' and 'Parsifal'. The fact that the man who would so emphatically impact the change in music for the new century created it places it in a special aura. It is a work of extraordinary orchestration and writing for the voice, a gigantic creation for large orchestra and large mixed and male choruses, five soloists and speaker (one of the many subtle reminders of Schönberg's innovative thoughts - Sprechstimme - that would become so important later) that tells the tragic medieval love story that includes a veritable tapestry of intricate, powerful emotions and leads to an overwhelmingly beautiful paean to nature.

Who better to interpret this complex work than Esa-Pekka Salonen, a man who not only has mastered the repertoire from all eras but who also is actively engaged in composing works that expand the present orchestral palette. This performance was recorded from the opening work in the Philharmonia's series 'City of Dreams: Vienna 1900 - 1935' performed earlier this year in Festival Hall in London. The score is very deeply embedded in Salonen's psyche and his ability to manage this at times unwieldy score with such precision without sacrificing the inherent lush colors and emotions is uncanny. He has chosen a first rate cast of soloists: Soile Isokoski is a soaringly beautiful Tove, Stig Andersen brings power and anguish to Waldemar, Monica Groop is Waldtaube who gives the Voice of the Wood Dove the entire spectrum of this extended aria its due, Ralf Lukas is Bauer, Andreas Conrad makes a marvelously animated Klaus the Fool, and the role of the Speaker in offered exotically by Barbara Sukowa. The Philharmonia's sound is rich and full on this recording and the men's chorus and mixed chorus (City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus and Philharmonia Voices) make the extended choral portions thrilling. There are few performance of 'Gurrelieder' that match the sonically astonishing finale 'Seht, die Sonne' - the unfolding passion that creates the rising of the sun that crowns this epic work. This is as fine a recording of the too rarely heard masterpiece of Schoenberg as will likely ever to appear. Well worth the rather high price of this import. It is simply brilliant!

Grady Harp

BBC Radio 3 DISC OF THE WEEK, October 2009

Arnold Schöenberg’s Gurrelieder started life in 1900 as a song cycle for two voices and piano, but within a year it was turning into a massive cantata for five soloists, narrator, three four-part male choruses, and a huge orchestra. And by 1911, when Schöenberg finished this neo-Wagnerian epic, his musical language was already embracing atonality.

Gurrelieder is the apogee of his late-romantic writing, and a vital transitional work, which isn’t often performed or recorded. This is the live performance with which Esa-Pekka Salonen launched the Philharmonia Orchestra’s ‘Vienna: City of Dreams’ season in 2009, and you can hear why it was critically acclaimed for the quality of the soloists, the impact of the choruses, and above all the playing of the Philharmonia – from transparent impressionistic textures to vast, bone-crunching climaxes.

The pacing of those climaxes turns out to be vital to Salonen’s reading: he doesn’t peak too soon, so that despite the excitement of the wild hunt in Part 3, there’s plenty left in the tank for the radiant Hymn to the Sun. As the doomed lovers Waldemar and Tove, Stig Anderson and Soile Isokoski are passionately committed, and Monica Groop’s Song of the Wood Dove is poignantly delivered. Anderson captures Waldemar’s pain and anger, railing against the heavens, while as his jester, Klaus the Fool, Andreas Konrad chatters crazily while the ghostly hunt surges about him. Barbara Sukowa makes an excellent narrator for nature’s renewal, before the chorus welcomes the concluding sunrise.

It’s an exhilarating journey from illicit love to redemption, and the sense of live adrenaline only increases the impact of Schöenberg’s score. The only reservation concerns the recording itself: there’s plenty of colour and dynamic range, but the boxy ambience of the Royal Festival Hall in London robs it of the rich sonic halo the performance deserves. There’s a touch more air to be had if you’re able to listen in surround from the SACD layer, and there’s no doubt that a real occasion has been captured here, great value at mid-price for the two hybrid SACDs.

Andrew MacGregor

SA-CD.net, 8th February 2010

How to categorise Schoenberg's epic setting of a Danish poem based on Medieval myth by Jens Peter Jacobsen? It began as a song cycle in 1900 and a year later it had evolved into a monster, with five soloists, a narrator, three male choruses of four parts each, an eight-part mixed chorus and an orchestra of over 150, including a huge battery of percussion and two iron chains. Schoenberg was in the full bloom of his Late Romanticism, imbued with the music of Wagner, Debussy and Richard Strauss, but owing to other work pressures had to lay aside Gurrelieder (The Songs of Gurre) until 1911, when he had time to complete it. By this time he had made his fateful steps into atonality, and every aspect of his music making had been changed - and decried. Gurrelieder's first airing in Vienna under his baton drew rapturous applause from an audience who had previously been walking out of performances of his latest music, causing the composer great pain.

Signum's new recording is based on live performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra under Esa-Pekka Salonen in February 2009. The venue is their base at the Royal Festival Hall, London. Salonen's vast experience as a composer and conductor of C20th music results in a sharply delineated performance. He makes the most of the opulent romanticism of the lover's dialogues in Part I yet savours the more advanced textures which appear in Part III. He never presses his singers along in the atmospheric love music of the first part, yet gradually ramps up tension and pace subsequently, finally launching his full forces at the great choral leap into C major for Gurrelieder's final glorious chorus "Behold the Sun".

The soloists are a well-balanced group, each with something to offer in building the drama. King Waldemar is Swedish tenor Stig Andersen, not as the fresh-voiced Siegfried he recently sung for Haenchen's Ring, but as an older and wiser character. Apart from some strain at the almost impossibly high note in his first song, his performance is strong and intelligent. The magnificent soprano tones of Soile Isokoski informs the role of Tove, Waldemar's young lover, and she deploys her full battery of skilful vocal acting and word painting. Mezzo Monica Groop has a lighter voice than previous Wood Doves such as Janet Baker, but her colourful narrative is compelling. Lesser roles, such as Ralf Lukas' gritty-voiced peasant called Bauer and Andreas Conrad's whining, ironic Jester add strong support.

Schoenberg's odd device of a Narrator to draw together narrative strands before the work's final peroration often takes the audience by surprise. The part is notated as Sprechstimme, a system that Schoenberg devised for indicating pitch in a dramatic spoken part. It was written for a man, and Schoenberg initially insisted it be performed by a male, until eventually hearing a woman's interpretation of it with another conductor, when he relented. The actress Barbara Sukowa (who also was Abbado's Speaker) is vocally virtuosic; her patter has energetic rhythmic impetus and imaginatively inflected speech, as if she were imitating that of historical story-tellers.

Although the combined choirs of the Philharmonia Voices and the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus number rather fewer members than Schoenberg hoped for, they are all in fine and vigorous voice, especially the men, who have to do most of the work. The Philharmonia itself, with an augmented brass division including seven each of trumpets and trombones plus ten horns, is in fine form, despite a few inevitable 'live' slips or tuning problems. The players collude with Salonen's forensic laying bare of the score, so that Schoenberg's careful layering of textures (often in chamber-like simplicity) cohere radiantly at the great climaxes.

The Royal Festival Hall, a central architectural pearl of the 1950s London 'Festival of Britain', sadly gained a reputation as an acoustic disaster (even worse than the Barbican). In 2007 it was reopened after substantial refurbishment, including extensive acoustic treatment. The resulting sound as revealed on this SACD is a considerable improvement, but dryness is still a problem, making this huge work (which is mainly placed outdoors) sound confined; reverberation times are still very short. In 5.1, there is a touch more ambience, especially around the singers (the Speaker seems to come from further back), and there is abundant detail, with more mid and bass warmth than the previous acoustic could muster. Even so, there is a tendency towards a light, bright sound, which to some extent might suit the more modern of Schoenberg's orchestrations. What certainly is present is impact. Drums, triangles and chains have impressive transients (if little decay time). There is no track-end applause, and I could barely detect the presence of an audience.

This exhilarating performance is certainly worth considering, together with the best RBCD versions such as Chailly, Levine and Abbado. These may have more open sound and bloom, but cannot compete with the SACD for detail at every level.

John Miller

BBC Music Magazine, December 2009

Schoenberg’s huge cantata, which makes formidable demands on all its vast number of participants, has dome astonishingly well on disc. Not only have there been far more recordings of it than one might expect, beginning in 1929 with Stokowski (still available), but they have all been at least good. It seems more than usually invidious to make comparisons at this level of excellence. This new contender, recorded live last February, is exciting, lucid, wonderfully well- proportioned, and recorded in stunning sound; the final hymn to the rising sun would lift the most morbid lethargist out of their chair. Whether you buy this rather than Craft’s wonderful account on Naxon’s or Rattle’s or Chailly’s or Abbado’s, is largely a matter - cost to one side - of preferences among the soloists. For me Chailly (on Decca) has the finest team of soloists including Hans Hotter, overwhelming as the Speaker. That role, normally taken by a man (Schoenberg suggested ‘a retired tenor’), is given to an actress on this recording, and she makes less impression.

As the two lovers, Stig Andersen and Solie Isokoski are committed, ardent, but while she sounds youthful he does sound past his best. In the impassioned Song of the Woodbird Monica Groop would make more impact if her words were clearer, but she too shares in the conviction which permeates the whole performance, enormously contributed to by the two choruses. It is Esa-Pekka Salonen, restraining his forces at first but then unleashing them with masterly control, who makes this a memorable performance.

Michael Tanner

The Gramophone, March 2010

Schoenberg’s epic cycle distinguished by fine playing from the Philharmonia.

I have a little list of Gurrelieder recordings burdened by an uningratiating effort at the central role of King Waldemar (Paul Althouse for Stokowski, Herbert Schachtschneider for Kubelík at the top of it in chronological and perhaps musical order), and this one, in many other ways valuable, must join them. To hear Stig Andersen even in slightly freer and more sustained voice at the start of Part 3, followed by the strength and sap of Andreas Conrad’s Klaus, is to be reminded of those all-too-familiar evenings when you wish Siegfried and Mime would swap costumes and give everyone concerned a break.

Would it, then, be missed? I think so. The engineers have also had to do their bit for Soile Isokosko – she is no Sieglinde – but she never puts her voice under pressure even when top B flats are called for, and she is more realistically “Tove-lille”, a young mistress to a king, shy and ardent then basking in glory, than several sopranos on record who might more convincingly have auditioned for the silent part of the slighted queen with murder in mind.

Monica Groop’s Wood-Dove flies over the orchestra rather than emerging from within it as Isokoski and Andersen do, most of the time, but she laments too much too soon: there is some want of deepening woe and pity at the refrain of “Weit flog ich”.

The Signum engineers have performed miracles to match and convey those of Schoenberg’s prodigious orchestration. The 90 male voices divided by 16 parts in the Wild Hunt is around a third the number that Schoenberg had in mind but they are a convincingly rowdier bunch than Ozawa’s Tanglewood Festival Choras at almost the same hectic stampede, without ever raising the unholy racket of Rattle’s vassals on EMI. Those who agreed with Michael Oliver about Barbara Sukowa’s “coy and exaggerated howling” on Abbado’s recording will enjoy her no more here. I find her interpretation entirely within the spirit of the part and its Sprechstimme writing, if not the letter, and no one else greets the final sunrise so ecstatically.

Nor need the Philharmonia fear competition: they play superbly, without the weight of central European counterparts but with no less power at the highly rhetorical closures of each part. Salonen is the first to record the revised (2007) Universal Edition of the score, and more diligent than most in his observance of Schoenberg’s detailed expressive markings as well as being ready to expand on them, broadening here and there to mixed effect. No one makes more of the crescendo for tenor drum on the last chord of Part 2 that forges yet another Wagnerian kinship, with the end of the second act of Parsifal.

Peter Quantrill

Musical Criticism, January 2012

The South Bank’s 2009 series City of Dreams: Vienna 1900-1935 offered a great opportunity to hear two rarely performed large choral works: Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony and Schoenberg’s monumental Gurrelieder.  Mahler’s eighth symphony, composed at around the same time regularly gets an airing, and I think Gurrelieder – in many ways the more interesting piece – ought to be heard at least as often.  It seems, though, that by the time he completed the work in 1911, more than ten years after its conception, Schoenberg didn’t even like it himself.  He was given a standing ovation in appreciation of the sumptuous late-romantic harmony at the premiere, but he turned his back on an audience that had shunned his more recent atonal work and applauded the efforts of the musicians instead.  There was also a deserving standing ovation at the original concert when this live recording was made and, happily, the high level of music making, as well as the buzz of the evening, has been successfully transferred to disc.

One of the reasons that Gurrelieder is so little performed is the sheer size of the forces required: a 150-piece orchestra (including 10 horns, four doubling as Wagner tubas and a battery of percussion), male chorus, mixed chorus and five soloists, including a speaker.  The text comprises, in German translation, a selection of poems from Danish poet Jens Peter Jacobson’s Songs of Gurre, based on a medieval legend.   And, with its themes of dead lovers reunited through the redeeming power of nature, Schoenberg was clearly still under the influence of Wagner.  The difference is that, while Tristan and Isolde shun the day and crave the night, King Waldemar, having lost his lover Tove to his wife’s jealousy, suffers tormented nights and longs for the renewal of spring – heralded at the end of the cantata by the dawning of a new day.

In the orchestral prelude, representing the sinking sun as well as hinting at the supernatural events to come, the chief selling point of this disc is immediately apparent: the sound of the orchestra.  The recording itself is immaculate, there is a beautiful transparency to the playing and everything is balanced perfectly.  The glittering jugendstil soundscape scored for 8 flutes, violins divided into 20 desks and 4 harps, is clean and clear, with all the instruments so well delineated that it is possible to make out all the intricate details of Schoenberg’s scoring.  And yet, against this mosaic, the solo trumpet emerges as the melody bearer without overpowering everything else.   This is not just flawless playing that has been recorded well, however, Esa-Pekka Salonen’s conducting gives an edge to the proceedings. The brass fanfare at the beginning of Part III, which calls the dead to life, is terrifying, as is the laser-sharp brass that alternates with soft woodwind in the short Part II.  He also brings a welcome touch of late romantic sentimentality to many passages, like the interlude in Part I after Waldemar has lamented his lost love.

In my review of the original concert I singled out Monica Groop as Waldtaube (the voice of the Wood-Dove – echoing the Woodbird in Wagner’s Siegfried) as the soloistic highlight.  Nothing has changed here: her rich, mellifluous sound is a joy to listen to.  The other two minor soloists are also good: Ralf Lukas as the peasant is suitably expressive in the slower passages; and Andreas Conrad as Klaus-Narr (a fool) manages to strike a jocular tone without sounding ridiculously manic, as some interpreters do.  The singers who take the roles of the two lovers, Stig Andersen as Waldemar and Soile Isokoski as Tove, sound slightly stretched, as if they are struggling to be heard above the orchestra.  Even so, in songs like ‘Du sendest mir einen Liebesblick’, Isokoski in league with Salonen still manages to whip up a moving climax.  And later on, in ‘Herrgott, weißt du, was, du tatest’ the single poem in Part II, the angry mood seems to suit Anderson better. 

As for the speaker, here we learn the lesson that what works in the concert hall doesn’t necessarily make for a good live recording.  The actress Barbara Sukowa was amplified, giving her performance a feeling of intimacy in the vast space of the Royal Festival Hall.  It seems that the engineers have had to record the amplification, rather than directly through the microphone, and the result is not only shrill and unpleasant but the warm, almost conversational tone has been lost, replaced by something that sounds overdone.

Out of the nearly two hours the piece lasts, the poor choruses have to sit doing nothing for almost all of it.  But the 10 minutes or so they do have are as exciting as anything in the piece.  At the climax of the work, when Waldemar is forced on a demonic wild hunt with the ghosts of his dead vassals, Salonen’s conducting again bristles with energy.  Some may complain that in these two sections the orchestra is too much in the foreground, sometimes seeming almost as if it is the choir that is doing the accompanying.  But I for one enjoy being able to hear what the orchestra is up to here, which is difficult to make out in the mêlée of sound in many other recordings. In a work of this complexity there are enough things that can go wrong to make it unlikely that there will ever be a perfect performance.  However, there is much to recommend this recording above its competitors, not least the transparency and clarity of the orchestral sound, not to mention the emotional impact of the conducting: drive and excitement one minute, giving way to a bit of good old late romantic sentimentality in the next.

Marc Brooks