19 Nov 2005
KRENEK: Lieder
While I was listening to this recording of Krenek’s song cycles Durch die Nacht (op. 67) and Gesänge des späten Jahres (op. 71), I started to think about art and memory.
Recently in Recordings
Henry Purcell, Royal Welcome Songs for King Charles II Vol. III: The Sixteen/Harry Christophers
The Sixteen continues its exploration of Henry Purcell’s Welcome Songs for Charles II. As with Robert King’s pioneering Purcell series begun over thirty years ago for Hyperion, Harry Christophers is recording two Welcome Songs per disc.
Anima Rara: Ermonela Jaho
In February this year, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho made a highly lauded debut recital at Wigmore Hall - a concert which both celebrated Opera Rara’s 50th anniversary and honoured the career of the Italian soprano Rosina Storchio (1872-1945), the star of verismo who created the title roles in Leoncavallo’s La bohème and Zazà, Mascagni’s Lodoletta and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
Requiem pour les temps futurs: An AI requiem for a post-modern society
Collapsology. Or, perhaps we should use the French word ‘Collapsologie’ because this is a transdisciplinary idea pretty much advocated by a series of French theorists - and apparently, mostly French theorists. It in essence focuses on the imminent collapse of modern society and all its layers - a series of escalating crises on a global scale: environmental, economic, geopolitical, governmental; the list is extensive.
Ádám Fischer’s 1991 MahlerFest Kassel ‘Resurrection’ issued for the first time
Amongst an avalanche of new Mahler recordings appearing at the moment (Das Lied von der Erde seems to be the most favoured, with three) this 1991 Mahler Second from the 2nd Kassel MahlerFest is one of the more interesting releases.
Max Lorenz: Tristan und Isolde, Hamburg 1949
If there is one myth, it seems believed by some people today, that probably needs shattering it is that post-war recordings or performances of Wagner operas were always of exceptional quality. This 1949 Hamburg Tristan und Isolde is one of those recordings - though quite who is to blame for its many problems takes quite some unearthing.
Women's Voices: a sung celebration of six eloquent and confident voices
The voices of six women composers are celebrated by baritone Jeremy Huw Williams and soprano Yunah Lee on this characteristically ambitious and valuable release by Lontano Records Ltd (Lorelt).
Rosa mystica: Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir
As Paul Spicer, conductor of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir, observes, the worship of the Blessed Virgin Mary is as ‘old as Christianity itself’, and programmes devoted to settings of texts which venerate the Virgin Mary are commonplace.
The Prison: Ethel Smyth
Ethel Smyth’s last large-scale work, written in 1930 by the then 72-year-old composer who was increasingly afflicted and depressed by her worsening deafness, was The Prison – a ‘symphony’ for soprano and bass-baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra.
Songs by Sir Hamilton Harty: Kathryn Rudge and Christopher Glynn
‘Hamilton Harty is Irish to the core, but he is not a musical nationalist.’
After Silence: VOCES8
‘After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.’ Aldous Huxley’s words have inspired VOCES8’s new disc, After Silence, a ‘double album in four chapters’ which marks the ensemble’s 15th anniversary.
Beethoven's Songs and Folksongs: Bostridge and Pappano
A song-cycle is a narrative, a journey, not necessarily literal or linear, but one which carries performer and listener through time and across an emotional terrain. Through complement and contrast, poetry and music crystallise diverse sentiments and somehow cohere variability into an aesthetic unity.
Flax and Fire: a terrific debut recital-disc from tenor Stuart Jackson
One of the nicest things about being lucky enough to enjoy opera, music and theatre, week in week out, in London’s fringe theatres, music conservatoires, and international concert halls and opera houses, is the opportunity to encounter striking performances by young talented musicians and then watch with pleasure as they fulfil those sparks of promise.
Carlisle Floyd's Prince of Players: a world premiere recording
“It’s forbidden, and where’s the art in that?”
John F. Larchet's Complete Songs and Airs: in conversation with Niall Kinsella
Dublin-born John F. Larchet (1884-1967) might well be described as the father of post-Independence Irish music, given the immense influenced that he had upon Irish musical life during the first half of the 20th century - as a composer, musician, administrator and teacher.
Haddon Hall: 'Sullivan sans Gilbert' does not disappoint thanks to the BBC Concert Orchestra and John Andrews
The English Civil War is raging. The daughter of a Puritan aristocrat has fallen in love with the son of a Royalist supporter of the House of Stuart. Will love triumph over political expediency and religious dogma?
Beethoven’s Choral Symphony and Choral Fantasy from Harmonia Mundi
Beethoven Symphony no 9 (the Choral Symphony) in D minor, Op. 125, and the Choral Fantasy in C minor, Op. 80 with soloist Kristian Bezuidenhout, Pablo Heras-Casado conducting the Freiburger Barockorchester, new from Harmonia Mundi.
Taking Risks with Barbara Hannigan
A Louise Brooks look-a-like, in bobbed black wig and floor-sweeping leather trench-coat, cheeks purple-rouged and eyes shadowed in black, Barbara Hannigan issues taut gestures which elicit fire-cracker punch from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
Alfredo Piatti: The Operatic Fantasies (Vol.2) - in conversation with Adrian Bradbury
‘Signor Piatti in a fantasia on themes from Beatrice di Tenda had also his triumph. Difficulties, declared to be insuperable, were vanquished by him with consummate skill and precision. He certainly is amazing, his tone magnificent, and his style excellent. His resources appear to be inexhaustible; and altogether for variety, it is the greatest specimen of violoncello playing that has been heard in this country.’
Those Blue Remembered Hills: Roderick Williams sings Gurney and Howells
Baritone Roderick Williams seems to have been a pretty constant ‘companion’, on my laptop screen and through my stereo speakers, during the past few ‘lock-down’ months.
Bruno Ganz and Kirill Gerstein almost rescue Strauss’s Enoch Arden
Melodramas can be a difficult genre for composers. Before Richard Strauss’s Enoch Arden the concept of the melodrama was its compact size – Weber’s Wolf’s Glen scene in Der Freischütz, Georg Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea or even Leonore’s grave scene in Beethoven’s Fidelio.
OPERA TODAY ARCHIVES »
Recordings
When you listen to a piece, or watch a movie, or go to a play or opera, shouldn’t you think about it afterward, if it’s to have some significance for you? For instance, the other night I watched the movie Stage Beauty, about an actor who played women’s roles right during the English Restoration when all of a sudden Charles II decreed that women could perform on stage. No more work for him. In spite of a rather formulaic plot, lots of interesting dialogue was bantered around about “the artist” and gender roles. I’ve been thinking about the film since, and repeating some of the bon mots (“Whenever we’re about to do something truly horrible, we say that the French have been doing it for a long time”). Memory and repetition.
Now, if a piece of music can be said to make an impact on you, beyond just thinking about it, shouldn’t you also be humming snatches? Or at least approximating a “la la la” when you’re telling a neighbor why you liked it? For millennia music was passed along orally. Homer’s tales went from storyteller to storyteller. Plays were passed from actor to actor. If people couldn’t tell their neighbor a couple of the best lines in something they’d just heard or seen, then the Joneses surely must have wondered if it was really all that hot. Memory and repetition.
Twentieth-century classical vocal music, on the other hand, doesn’t tend to be very hummable. Not like something by Rodgers or Kern or Berlin or Sondheim (well, generally hummable). How many college freshmen run in and tell their roommate, “I just heard this great piece! Pierrot lunaire!” “Can you hum a few bars?” It may make an impact, but if we can’t reproduce any of it, how significant is it to us? We can’t all sing “Di quella pira,” but most of us can la la la la-la-la-la-la the opening line. Do we have to be able to hum a few bars for a piece to be significant? Perhaps this decline and fall of hummability is one reason for the current abyss between the public and classical music. Memory but not repetition.
Ravel is hummable. And Poulenc. Is hummability in modern music one of those truly horrible characteristics of French composers? Britten is hummable only some of the time: “O beauty, o handsomeness, goodness ...” Still thinking about the gender roles, apparently. Berg: we don’t usually think of him as a hummable composer, but his early setting of “Schliesse mir die Augen beide” sticks in my resonators for some reason. Othmar Schoeck, the very under-appreciated Swiss composer of many beautiful songs: I can hum almost all of his Hesse setting “Im Nebel.” Maybe because the words mean something to me, in addition to my liking their musical setting. There’s another setting of the same poem by the Austrian Gottfried von Einem, but I can’t hum that one; it’s tonal, but it just isn’t as significant to me.
So now to Krenek. I can hum one snippet of Krenek, from his jazz opera Jonny spielt auf. But Krenek moved on from his jazz style to a more expressionist style, heard in the two cycles in this recording, to serialism, then to an individualistic post-serialist style. Passages of these songs are very Romantic, in the style of, say, Berg, but Krenek puts his study of Schoenberg to good use; the vocal lines tend to be angular, and triads are the new dissonances.
The other issue with these songs, and with all songs, is the text. The first set are based on poems by Karl Kraus, the voice of early-twentieth-century Vienna through his editorship of the journal Die Fackel. Kraus was very influential on other literary and artistic types at the time and for a decade or two following, but he seems awfully dated nowadays, more so than Wilhelm Mueller’s poems when we hear them sung to Schubert’s music. Krenek wrote his own poems for the second set: “the artist” again, the dark night of the soul, etc., etc. I’m not going to argue that it helps in remembering and repeating a song if it’s happy (“Im Nebel” gives the lie to that argument), but, God, so many twentieth-century songs are so dreary! Lorenz Hart may have been a cynic, but then we are “Bewitched.” And it’s always a danger when a composer thinks he or she should write both words and music (Richard Rodgers didn’t have much luck with this). It encourages them to say in 45 minutes what they should have said in 15.
So, taking this admonition about prolixity to heart, I will urge devotees of the twentieth-century lied to add this disc to their collections, even though you probably won’t be able to hum the best bits later. If you know Krenek’s operas of the twenties, these songs show how he made his way to his later important works like the opera Karl V, the ravishing choral work Lamentation Jeremiae Prophetae, or the later piano sonatas, championed by Glenn Gould. The performances are first rate by all concerned; soprano Hanna Dóra Sturludóttir brings a particularly beautiful voice to the first set of songs. I may not be able to hum my favorite passage, but I certainly would be inclined to listen to her performance again. Maybe in this post-oral-transmission age, that’s the best we can hope for nowadays from memory and repetition.
David E. Anderson