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Schoenberg, Gurrelieder: Soloists, City of Birmingham Chorus; Philharmonia Voices, Philharmonia Orchestra/Esa-Pekka Salonen. Royal Festival Hall, London 28.2.2009 (CC)

Stig Anderson Waldemar
Soile Isokoski Tove
Ralf Lukas Peasant
Andreas Conrad Klaus-Narr (“Claus-Fool”)
Monica Groop Wood Dove
Barbara Sukova (speaker)


The concert series City of Dreams: Vienna 1900-1935 is clearly going to be an important one. The 2008/09 season is Esa-Pekka Salonen’s first as Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra and he is out to make his mark in no uncertain way. The series will see the orchestra in 18 major European cities over a period of some nine months. It is a co-production between the orchestra and the Vienna Konzerthaus but also includes partnerships with galleries and museums in both Vienna and London. Such cross-disciplinary ambition is to be loudly applauded.

Talking of ambition, surely there are few more impressive ways to open a series than with Schoenberg’s huge Gurrelieder?. And right from the beginning, Salonen stated his credentials, and his ethos, in presenting an opening that was clear and beautiful but without a trace of indulgence. In this way, he avoided a mush of sound, a mere blurred tapestry. It was all the more beautiful because of the slightly held-back approach.  Salonen’s movements, here as throughout, were a joy to watch – clear beat but highly expressive. He paced the entire piece perfectly, always structurally aware as he painted moment-to-moment with exquisite brush-strokes. Gurrelieder is an interpretative challenge, given the hybrid nature of the score (part-oratorio, part-opera, part-phantasmogoric dreamscape –lighting, by David Holmes, was used to lift the performance from straightforward concert performance). The conductor, too, has to resist the urge to wallow in the great Romantic outpourings. Salonen’s way was such that these were carefully balanced but lost none of their effect, and nowhere was this better heard than in the brief Part II. The Philharmonia was ultra-responsive to Salonen’s shifts of direction and to Schoenberg’s miraculous orchestration. Even the most condensed writing of the Part III emerged as what can best be described as a magnificent cacophony. It was Salonen and his orchestra that were the stars here, and it was conductor and orchestra that ensured that this was a performance to remember.

The two featured singers in Part I were Isokoski (Tove) and Andersen (Waldemar). Behind them, a huge screen for surtitles. The Danish tenor Stig Andersen, who is something of a Wagner specialist, seemed a little overshadowed by his Tove on this occasion. His voice is not really textbook Heldentenorisch, and some more sense of presence would have been welcomed. His “Wunderliche Tove” was almost believable, but just not quite – ditto his railing against God in the last part. Isokoski, who has not always impressed (her Vier letzte Lieder with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Mehta ten years ago at the Proms being a case in point, as was a Wigmore recital in 2004), here exhibited a silvery edge to her voce that worked very well. She was best in the stronger passages. When she was forced to the lower dynamics and towards delicacy, her voice could take on a rather papery feel (luckily not for the magical moment when she tells Waldemar she loves him).

Monica Groop was luxury casting for the “Lied der Waldtaube”. Wagner loomed large here, both in the scoring and in Groop’s Erda-isch delivery. The role of the idiot whose commentary holds revealing depths is not a new concept – Shakespeare (King Lear) and the legendary Nasreddin of Central Asia and the Middle East are but two obvious examples. Schoenberg has his own version in the shape of “Klaus-Narr” (“Claus-Fool”). The powerful of voice, Dresden-trained  Andreas Conradtook the role well, helped by the Philharmonia’s astoundingly characterful wind and brass.

Barbara Sukova, an actress who has featured in films by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (amongst others), was a mesmerising Speaker, mainly because this was the most convincing instance of Sprechgesang I have ever come across. Her voice swooped, rose and dived but the melodic contour was always intact in “The Wild Hunt of the Summer Wind”; her stage presence was immense.

It was in Part III that we were treated to the combined excellence of choral forces from Birmingham and London. Together they delivered some of the finest choral singing I have heard, simultaneously reminding us of the masterly nature of Schoenberg’s choral writing (interested listeners might also like to investigate Moses und Aron in this regard).

The concert programme (which covers the entire series) is well worth acquiring. It even merits a paragraph all to itself. Julian Johnson, the series consultant, writes on “Musical Dreamscapes”; Edward Timms contributes “Vienna Circles: The Parameters of Cultural Innovation” (with some amazing diagrams describing the creative interactions in the Vienna of this period)’ Robert Vilain gives us “Left in the lurch by words: Viennese Literary Modernism”, and finally Simon Shaw-Miller tackles “Art in Vienna, (1900-1935)” This is all before the excellent programme notes on the music even start.

Colin Clarke


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