COMPOSERS: Schoenberg
LABELS: Naxos
ALBUM TITLE: Schoenberg
WORKS: Moses und Aron
PERFORMER: Wolfgang Schöne, Chris Merritt, Irena Bespalovaite, Bernhard Schneider, Michael Ebbecke, Karl-Friedrich Dürr; Polish Radio Choir, Kraków; Stuttgart State Opera Chorus & Orchestra/Roland Kluttig
CATALOGUE NO: 8.660158-59
There are excellent things in this
bargain-price Moses und Aron,
recorded live at the Stuttgart
Staatsoper in December 2003.
Perhaps most impressive is the
natural way that the big ensembles
flow, the multifarious counterpoint
of voices and instruments making
complete musical and dramatic sense
with no sense of strain but plenty of
conviction. There’s some first-rate
orchestral playing, too: Schoenberg’s
brass writing, especially, comes
across with great gusto. Roland
Kluttig clearly has his forces well in
hand, though he chooses some rather
leaden tempos for the Dances round
the Golden Calf.
As Moses, Wolfgang Schöne,
though intelligent, seems curiously
diffident – he conveys little of the
character’s almost enraged, baffled
inability to communicate, the
harshness and near-inarticulacy
of his Sprechstimme. For much of
Act I he also seems too backwardly
balanced, too easily overwhelmed in
the ensembles, his solos insufficiently
audible or commanding. And in
Moses’s great concluding soliloquy
he sounds more meditative than
anguished. Chris Merritt is a flashily
commanding Aron – Schoenberg
wanted him to have a conventionally
‘operatic’ tenor, but one gets a
little tired of his vibrato in slow
passages. Overall this new version
hardly displaces Boulez’s ideally
authoritative reading with Günter
Reich’s darkly eloquent Moses and
Richard Cassilly’s charismatic Aron.
Still, this is an admirably inexpensive
way into one of Schoenberg’s greatest
works, and one whose relevance – in
Moses’s insistence on the primacy of
unseen, immaterial spiritual truth
rather than the physical benefits of
miracles, idols, land – is as urgent as
ever today. Calum MacDonald