Berliner Philharmoniker / Kirill Petrenko BEETHOVEN Symphony No. 9

 

SYMPHONY No. 9

 

Freiburger Barockorchester / René Jacobs BEETHOVEN Leonore

As we know it today, Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, was first performed in 1814. But it had begun life in 1805 as Leonore, when its premiere in Vienna, to an audience largely made up of French officers from Napoleon’s occupying army who could not understand any of the German text, had been a disaster. Beethoven revised the score immediately, cutting swathes and recasting the original three acts into two, but he was still unhappy with the result, which was withdrawn after two performances the following year. When it emerged again, eight years later, both the music and the words had been even more substantially altered, and this time the premiere was a huge success.

et though Fidelio is now a central part of the operatic repertory, some insist that the 1805 Leonore is the better, more dramatically convincing work. One of those is John Eliot Gardiner, who in 1997 conducted one of the three previous recordings of the original score, and another is René Jacobs, who is responsible for this latest one. According to Jacobs, not only does the 1805 three-act version have the better, more musically daring overture (now known in the concert hall as Leonore No 2) but Beethoven’s revisions and compressions removed first-rate music from the score, notably an entire aria in the first act for Rocco, and a duet for Leonore and Marzelline in the second, doing severe damage to the work’s dramaturgy.

Jacobs’ recording, taken from a live performance in Paris a year ago, makes his case for him eloquently enough. His tempi are generally on the fast side, though the superb, crisp playing of the period-instrument Freiburg Baroque Orchestra ensures they never seem too hectic. But though the dialogue has been rewritten and apparently abridged, there still seems an awful lot of it, with the spoken voices just a bit too far forward in the stereo picture and sound effects rather self-consciously prominent, too. And if the cast, led by Marlis Petersen as Leonore and Maximilian Schmitt as Florestan, does not include any voices to compare to those on some of the great Fidelio recordings of the last century, their general lightness and flexibility puts the opera more convincingly into its proper context.

As Jacobs and his singers present it, this is Beethoven’s opera as a descendant of the 18th-century Singspiel tradition, especially that of Mozart’s Entführung and Zauberflöte. Leonore may not be the great celebration of political freedom that later generations have valued in Fidelio, but historically perhaps it’s something more interesting. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)

Marlis Petersen / Camillo Radicke DIMENSIONEN - ANDERSWELT

The Otherworld... The human being rooted in the world that sees only what the eye can see… Does he at once dare a glance to the side where nature, spirits and elemental beings reside? Not many of us have kept the ability to view them and get in contact. This release offers you the ‘Otherworldly’ eye from the early Romantic period up to the classical modernism, including the Northern countries (Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland), and now hope you allow yourself to be "lost to the world"… Plunge into the magical world of twilight - populated with elemental spirits, elves, waterlilies, nymphs and merman. The creatures of the unseen are the protagonists of this classical song album and tempt the listener into their legendary realms. Carl Loewe, Johannes Brahms, Max Reger, Nikolai Medtner, Hugo Wolf, Alexander Zemlinsky, Franz Schreker, Hans Sommer and many more engaged themselves in this mystic world and set it in music in a very sensual and playful way!

Kent Nagano / Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg JÖRG WIDMANN Arche

Commissioned to write new music to inaugurate the Elbphilharmonie concert hall in Hamburg, composer Jörg Widmann drew inspiration from the shape of the building itself: “From the outside it resembles a ship. To me, the interior looked like the hold of a ship, an ark…Re-emerging into the daylight, the ark idea would not leave me alone. The inflection of the music I had to compose was clear….”  Arche, an Oratorio for soloists, choirs, organ and orchestra is a compendious work embracing the course of history in the west with a collaged libretto drawing upon a range of writers: from the unknown authors of the Old Testament to Nietzsche and Sloterdijk via Francis of Assisi, Michelangelo and Schiller. Arche looks at the tradition of the oratorio and transforms it. Dieter Rexroth in the liner notes: “What immediately stands out is above all the impression of paradox and the vast diversity of forms and musical resources. Everything happens at once, everything interlocks. Every moment transports us into another world.” Kent Nagano directs the massed musical forces with aplomb in this concert recording from the premiere performance in January 2017. (ECM Records)

Marlis Petersen / Anke Vondung / Werner Güra / Konrad Jarnot / Christoph Berner / Camillo Radicke SCHUMANN Spanische Liebeslieder op. 138

The Liederspiel was an early 19th-century genre in which songs, often on well-known texts, were added into plays. Schumann revived the form in 1849 with the three works presented on this recording, but without including any dialogue. Each work requires a vocal quartet, but unlike Brahms’s much more familiar sets of Liebeslieder Waltzer , most of the musical numbers are solo songs or duets, with relatively few full-ensemble settings. The texts—10 translations apiece by Emanuel Geibel of 15th- and 16th-century Spanish love poetry in opp. 74 and 138, and eight Rückert love poems in op. 101—present no apparent narrative, but the perceptive Schumann biographer John Daverio points out the outline of a dramatic progression in op. 74 “from the first meeting of the lovers to the burgeoning of their love in the form of grief, from their fear that neither returns the other’s feelings to union in mutual bliss.”  

In the excellent booklet notes, Roman Hinke cites the “imitation of Spanish color” as a musical link between op. 74 and 138, but to my ear, Schumann’s attempts at capturing a Spanish musical flavor take the form of a few generically ethnic flourishes—a recurrence of minor keys, changing meters in op. 138’s piano interlude, occasional repeated chords that may signify guitar strumming—so subtle as to be an almost negligible element in the music. The baritone’s wild song “Der Contrabandiste,” included as an appendix to op. 74, is the most exotic piece here. Its middle section sounds like Klezmer music.  

As with quite a few other late Schumann works, the Liederspiele invent their own unclassifiable, hybrid genre. They’re not exactly song cycles, the Spanish text origins don’t result in a strong Spanish musical influence, and the vocal quartet sings together only occasionally, but what matters is that the three collections offer consistently delightful music, an entertaining variety of moods, and, in this performance, a showcase for some bright, healthy singing and unfailingly stylish and sensitive piano playing.
Some of the reticence and occasional bleakness of Schumann’s late style is here, but there is also infectious good humor, particularly in the pieces for full quartet, and there are many examples of the uniquely touching quality that Schumann achieves in his best songs, early and late.
The most memorable song in op. 101 is the heartfelt “Mein schöner Stern” with its almost painfully surging opening phrase. It is beautifully sung by tenor Werner Güra with finely focused sound and a minimum of vibrato, but the performance by Elly Ameling in her classic 1967 Schumann recital with Jörg Demus on Harmonia Mundi remains unsurpassed. The most striking singing here comes from the radiant soprano Marlis Petersen, Natalie Dessay’s last-minute replacement in the Metropolitan Opera’s Hamlet last season and a fine Pamina on René Jacobs’s new Zauberflöte recording. Konrad Jarnot phrases well, but his so-called bass baritone is a light, slender instrument. His solo in op. 138, “Flutenreicher Ebro,” a delightfully Schubertian strophic song, is given a much more satisfying (and slower) performance by a real bass-baritone, William Warfield, on an old recording with the duo pianists Gold and Fizdale along with the great tenor Léopold Simoneau, who sounds awkward in this repertoire and has very strange German pronounciation.
Harmonia Mundi’s pairing of the two Spanish Liederspiele with the less familiar Minnespiel (Love Songs) makes great sense. The two “Spanish” works are more often combined with the Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzer on recordings and, surprisingly, this seems to be the first disc to include all three works. It’s a delightful disc with vibrant recorded sound that I’m certain will give great pleasure to all lovers of Schumann and German Lieder. (Paul Orgel)