When this
Gurrelieder first appeared on LP in 1979, it went
immediately to the top of the pile in terms of recommended recordings.
Schoenberg’s mammoth score needed stereo to do it any sort of justice, and
none of the three previous stereo versions had been anything like ideal.
Rafael Kubelík’s version on DG suffered from a recording balance that placed
the microphones very close indeed to the soloists, none of whom benefited
from such close observation.
Janos Ferencsik’s version on EMI had Janet Baker as the Wood
Dove, but nothing else to recommend it. Pierre Boulez on CBS equally
suffered from a close observation of every strand of the texture, which not
only exposed some very unsteady singing but also completely dissolved the
rich romantic textures of the score. To hear this Philips version under
Seiji Ozawa, on the other hand was balm to the ears, with three superb
soloists at the top of their form and a recording balance that fully
realised
Gurrelieder for what it was, one of the last of the
gargantuan romantic scores written in the aftermath of Wagner and
Strauss.
Now, nearly forty years later, it still sounds pretty good. Jessye Norman
is warm-voiced and sensuous as Tove, bathing her vocal lines in splendour
without any sense of strain. James McCracken is mellifluous as her lover
Waldemar, with no sense of
Heldentenor barking in a role that
stretches the voice to its heights. Tatiana Troyanos is tender and plangent
by turns in her big narrative ‘aria’ as the Wood Dove. The massive
Tanglewood Festival Chorus have all the rumbustious involvement that anyone
could require, and Seiji Ozawa irradiates the massive orchestration with a
late-romantic glow. This performance is all splendidly realised by the
expanded forces of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. This won a
Gramophone Award for choral recording, and rightly so.
However since 1979 there have been other recordings which have also done
full justice to Schoenberg’s score, and the most prominent of these has been
Decca’s 1985 studio recording from the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by
Riccardo Chailly. In those days Decca’s engineering teams were second to
none, and they were at the peak of their form on that occasion. They also
had the advantage of the most musical of
Heldentenors in the shape
of Siegfried Jerusalem, who shows some signs of strain on high notes that
McCracken avoids but also has the natural heroic resonance which the second
and third parts of the work really need. It has to be observed also that
Chailly scored over Ozawa in the casting of the minor roles in Part Three,
and a speaker in the shape of Hans Hotter in the final section who has
considerably more authority than the somewhat thin-toned Werner Klemperer
for Ozawa. Chailly also benefited from recording under studio conditions,
while Ozawa suffers from the hazards of live performance especially in the
somewhat backward balances afforded to both the speaker and chorus. There
has also been a raft of later live recordings – those by
Sir Simon Rattle, James Levine, Esa-Pekka Salonen and a
remake by Pierre Boulez spring to mind among many others – where the greater
familiarity of performers with the score has yielded tangible benefits.
In passing I should perhaps mention two small textual points. In the
Song of the Wood dove, just before the final climax, there is a
single bar omitted which features in Schoenberg’s full score. This is a cut
which is made – so far as I am aware – in all recordings, and it seems that
the composer may have introduced it at a very early stage in the work’s
performance history. The bar in question is a repetition of the
ostinato which has been building through the preceding passage. I
have little doubt that its omission is of benefit; it leads directly from
the high B-flat sung by the mezzo into the massive orchestral outburst that
follows, without allowing the music to ‘hang fire’. One other episode that
can however cause problems is the sustained passage for
pianissimo
high piccolos just before the final narration and chorus. This is extremely
difficult for the players, and in his book
Anatomy of the Orchestra
Norman Del Mar relates how he found it expedient to obtain the real still
quietness that is required here by substituting small penny-whistles for the
piccolos at this point. I don’t think that Ozawa, or indeed any other
conductor, adopts such a procedure; but his piccolos manage to play very
quietly without any obvious sense of strain. Maybe orchestral players
nowadays are better able to cope with such extravagant demands than they
were back in Del Mar’s day.
In the final analysis, this version of
Gurrelieder no longer
automatically reigns unchallenged over its rivals as it did at the time of
its first release. It is nonetheless very much worth hearing again, and in
this new transfer available from Presto Classics it comes complete with the
full texts and translations that were supplied at the time of the original
release. Also it features in Jessye Norman the most sensual Tove of all, her
mezzo-ish tinges giving a sense of romantic involvement to her lines without
the slightest suspicion of wobble or strain. It may no longer be a first
choice, but it still has a considerable appeal for those who love this
score.
Paul Corfield Godfrey
