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Schoenberg, Gurrelieder: Soloists, City of Birmingham Chorus; Philharmonia Voices, Philharmonia Orchestra / Esa-Pekka Salonen,  Symphony Hall , Birmingham 27.2.2009 (BK)

Stig Andersen Waldemar
Soile Isokoski Tove
Ralf Lukas Peasant
Andreas Conrad Klaus-Narr
Monica Groop Wood Dove
Barbara Sukova (speaker)


As far as I am concerned, any live performance of Gurrelieder is one of the greatest privileges available to concert-going audiences anywhere and quite possibly for all time. This was only the second occasion that  I had heard it  performed in concert in almost 30 years, and yet its grandiloquent audacity continues to amaze me.  Here is a young man, virtually unknown and with little formal instruction in composition when he begins the work,  who chooses to write in a super-romantic post-Wagnerian fashion using  enormous orchestral and vocal forces almost profligately. How could anyone - whoever he might be - set out to do such a thing, I find myself asking, and then turn his back on it almost completely, even before it is first performed in a full orchestral version 13 years later? And all of this despite the fact that praise for the work - when it finally does get performed  - flows from both his fellow composers and the public alike.

Well, genius is incomprehensible I suppose, to those who are merely mortal and like Wagner, Schoenberg was clearly no ordinary man. All that we can say of genius is that it always goes its own way and - again just like Wagner -  Schoenberg clearly needed to get something out of his system before embarking on his  individualised journey. Even so, the use of an orchestra needing 150 players, three four -part male choruses, a vast mixed chorus singing in eight parts and five soloists of grand opera standard is quite some catharsis even for Aristotle;  and it seems still greater in Schoenberg's case, given that Freud was only 22 when the composer was born.

The performance preceded this Gurrelieder's  London premiere - highly rated by Colin Clarke here  -  by a day. It  was no dress rehearsal however and despite some less than enthralling singing by Soile Isokoski and Stig Andersen in the Tove and Waldemar episode - both were curiously passionless for a couple rapturously in love -  it was clear that Salonen had the work firmly in his grip from the outset. With  the appearance of Monica Groop's Wood Dove  however - which she sang without a score unlike the other soloists -  the sound became simply electrifying and Ms Groop herself - what a truly arresting singer she can be - delivered one of the most intelligent and committed performances that I have heard from her in the last fifteen years. In similar vein, Andreas Conrad's  Klauss - Knarr rang out strongly in Part III with crystal clear diction while singing his artful attack on Waldemar's folly. And if anyone needed persuading that Sprechstimme is a powerful dramatic device, then the actress Barbara Sukowa was just the woman to do it. Hers was a tour de force performance, her voice holding the melodic line even when next door to an Edvard Munch scream, and making a truly extraordinary prelude to the full chorus's Seht die Sonne.

The orchestra and the choruses played and sang their hearts out, responding to Salonen's immaculate leadership with everything they could muster and coalescing magnificently in the cataclysmic wall of sound with which the work ends.  Really rather good then, and an eloquently powerful tribute to Salonen's top-flight reputation.

Bill Kenny


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