In the years after the First World War Schoenberg and his friends set up a
Society for Private Musical Performances. Contemporary works were carefully
prepared and performed to audiences who were not allowed to applaud or the
reverse, and critics were forbidden. A wide variety of works was given,
including many whose idiom was very far from that of Schoenberg and his
circle: works by Debussy, Bartók, Stravinsky and Milhaud for example. They
could not afford large orchestras so various members made chamber
arrangements of large works. This was when recording was in its infancy. And
they weren’t always serious: all the members of the Second Viennese School
made versions of Strauss waltzes for these concerts.
The Royal Academy of Music has had the idea of recreating this tradition
through recordings, performing both some of the works in the versions which
survive from that time and also commissioning new ones. This disc is the
third in their series. Zemlinsky was Schoenberg’s teacher and later
brother-in-law and Busoni was Schoenberg’s predecessor as a professor in
Berlin. The two of them displayed a wary respect for each other.
Schoenberg himself made the version of Mahler’s
Lieder eines
fahrenden Gesellen we hear, and Mark Seow’s sleeve-note
informs us that Schoenberg had been rather ambivalent about Mahler, though
he honoured him and Mahler reciprocated by giving him patronage. This
version works very well, as one might expect from such a master orchestral
writer, and the singer benefits from not having large orchestral forces to
contend with. Gareth Brynmor John sings fluently with a good lyrical line
and clear German. We should not complain if he does not yet dig into the
words as deeply as, say, Christian Gerhaher in a fine recent issue of the
normal orchestral version; in its own terms this is a good performance.
Busoni developed an idiom which, one you have caught it, is unmistakable:
partly through wavering between major and minor and partly through strange
harmonic and contrapuntal combinations he evokes an atmosphere which is
eerie and haunting, impossible to forget and addictive once you are used to
it. (Declaration: I am an addict.) He originally wrote his
Berceuse élégiaque as a piano piece in memory of
his mother who had recently died. He later orchestrated it, and we have here
a chamber version which is, as it were, half way between the composer’s own
two versions, by Erwin Stein, a
Schoenberg pupil. He captures much of the mystery and magic
of the original but a little is lacking because he misses some of the
instruments Busoni asked for in his by no means large ensemble, and which
you can hear in Järvi’s version.
Zemlinsky’s songs to words by Maeterlinck have become
tolerably well known in recent years. Four of them are written in the
Jugendstil idiom which is also that of Schoenberg’s early tonal works, both
rich and delicate – I want to say feathery. They are played here in a new
orchestration by Christopher Austin, who contributes an interesting account
of it in the sleeve-note. He included two instruments which Zemlinsky had
not: an accordion and a vibraphone, the latter to give ‘a tiny glimpse of
the world of Alban Berg’s
Lulu’. This is intriguing, but I have to
point out that Zemlinsky is not Berg – though they were on friendly terms –
that when Zemlinsky wrote these songs Lulu was some twenty years in the
future, and that if some of the songs suggest a later idiom it is,
surprisingly, not that of Berg but of Kurt Weill. The last two of the songs
– in the numbered order, which is not the order of composition – seem to me
to anticipate in a much gentler idiom, respectively, the last and first of
the numbers in Weill’s
Seven Deadly Sins.
Be that as it may, Katie Bray sings them well, with a lovely tone and
again good German. However, she is occasionally unsteady and she has a
tendency to linger in the lusher passages, which her conductor, Trevor
Pinnock indulges rather than reins in. He is best known as a baroque
specialist and is here very far from his comfort zone. I felt that Anne
Sofie von Otter had a tighter grip on them, with John Eliot Gardiner
conducting – another baroque specialist away from his usual turf – but even
better was Violeta Urmana with James Conlon, a Zemlinsky specialist.
We end with the
Siegfried Idyll, and of course
all these composers revered Wagner. This could be counted as an arrangement
as well, though it is really a reversion to Wagner’s original, which was for
solo rather than orchestral strings. There are more recordings of the larger
version than you can shake a stick at; of that with solo strings there is a
classic one by Solti with soloists of the Vienna Philharmonic, made in
between recording sessions for
Die Walküre. The excellent Royal
Academy Soloists do not quite equal that but they give a good and sensitive
performance which rounds off an enterprising disc. I heard it in two-channel
stereo; the sound has the atmosphere of a small concert hall, which is
right. The sleeve-note is in English only but includes original texts and
translations of the vocal works.
Stephen Barber
