Schoenberg reviews

As a viola player himself, Hindemith played in an ensemble together with the violinist Szymon Goldberg and the cellist Emanuel Feuermann, so he knew the workings of the string trio from the inside. The first of his two trios was written during his enfant terrible years in the 1920s. Beginning with an energetic Toccata and ending with a frenetic fugue, it includes a movement almost entirely in pizzicato – some four years before Bartók wrote a similar piece in his Fourth String Quartet.

Given its Wagnerian antecedents, it seems surprising that Schoenberg’s early, hyper-Romantic song-cycle-cum-oratorio-cum-music-drama Gurre-Lieder had apparently never been staged before this spectacular Dutch National Opera production. Presumably the vast orchestra required precluded all but the largest theatres, while the work’s leisurely, un-operatic pacing presents a real challenge to the inventiveness of any stage director.

Jessye Norman’s Wesendonck Lieder is remarkable for the lush depth of vocal beauty and James Levine’s attentive accompaniment. Their Strauss, Tchaikovsky (slightly flat) and Schoenberg Brettl-Lieder pale by comparison.

Anna Piccard

Brahms’s Quartet No. 3 finds him in unusually playful mood. The Vivace gallops in with such a display of rhythmic cross-cutting, it could be a Mozartian dance finale that’s arrived unfashionably early. The Kuss Quartet artfully exploits its disruptive mischief and innate asymmetry. They are also nicely stealthy in the elusive second subject, as it creeps around in the harmonic undergrowth of the development before emerging into rational daylight.

In 1918 Arnold Schoenberg founded the Society for Private Musical Performances to present all that was new – stipulating, significantly, no applause and without the ‘corrupting influence of publicity’. With these high ideals behind him, he arranged Mahler’s big orchestral song-cycles for chamber ensemble. A unique scent arises from these distillations, in music which touches the most raw nerve-endings of Mahler’s writing – nowhere more tellingly than in the long, last farewell of Das Lied von der Erde.

Even with the sophistications of current sound technology, the young Schoenberg’s hyper-Romantic monster masterpiece Gurrelieder remains a challenge to record. Dynamics and scoring range from the most delicate chamber textures to the mass sonorities of a vast choir and an orchestra of some 140 players. The score also teems with volatile interior details and figurations – by no means all discernable in this latest recording.