Critic’s Notebook: Schoenberg’s Birthday Gift at the Musikverein

A.Schoenberg, Gurre-Lieder E.P.Salonen, Philharmonia Signum

The Big 150: Arnold Goes Romantic

Schoenberg’s Birthday, on September 13th, was celebrated in style at the Musikverein with a performance – two performances, to be precise – of his Gurre-Lieder. If, somehow, you have not heard this grand romantic cantata, imagine a mature Mahler to have written a sequel to Das klagende Lied. The only problems with it are that it’s expensive to mount, what with a massive orchestra of some 150 musicians, four (!) choruses, and six soloists… and that Schoenberg’s name is attached to it, which keeps people away, no matter what’s actually being played. Someone has got to have a birthday, for a presenter or venue to bother with Gurre-Lieder.

Venue and orchestra have form. When the work was premiered 101 years ago, that took place in the Musikverein. (The Konzerthaus was still being built.) And the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, performing their first, but somehow not their official inaugural, concert with Petr Popelka as their reigning chief conductor, was the performing body (under a different name). Fitting then, but not necessarily suitable. The Musikverein is too small for the Gurre-Lieder. While it is still possible – and only just– to squeeze all the participating musicians on stage and balcony, it is not possible to keep the acoustic from collapsing unto itself. It’s understandable that the Musikverein wished to celebrate Schoenberg with the one romantic “event composition” his oeuvre has to offer, but it’s a musically selfish move; the work demands to be performed across the street, in the essentially purpose-built Great Hall of the Konzerthaus.

Perhaps the grumbling over the location would have been less pronounced, had the performance been more successful. Yes, the cast was great. Only Michael Weinius (already stepping in for a colleague and announced as under the weather) was not entirely convincing in this fiendishly difficult part – but early on he still did very well, starting out relaxed rather than belting (perhaps because the announcement freed him of proving a point?) and sounding rather pleasant. The rest, was what you might wish for, in such a hyper-late-romantic banger… assuming you heard them over the creaking and screeching orchestra: The highly pregnant Vera-Lotte Boecker was a radiant, soaring, rich Tove (Waldemar’s love); Sasha Cooke a controlled, sonorous Wood dove, fresh and with beauty of timbre that easily flattering any of the pigeons in my neighborhood. In the second half, Gerhard Siegel (as Klaus the Jester), a character-tenor that screams “Mime” the second he opens his mouth, was able to get above the orchestra surprisingly often, ditto Florian Boesch, whose Peasant had the easiest time being heard, given the reduced orchestral passages that he sings along to. And Angela Denoke, as the (amped) speaker, did a whole lot more than just speaking in this part: She gave voice to the lyrical element of her Sprechgesang.

So yes, the VSO, under Popelka (who has impressed me on the occasions I have heard him previously), did well but also did not have their finest hour. If the constantly excessive noise levels, right from the beginning, can still be blamed on Schoenberg, the slew of wobbly entries, off-kilter harmonics, shrill woodwinds, the nervous energy… all that was less than ideal. Most of it was lost in the general sense of euphoria, such a grand work can elicit live, but not entirely. And come the entry of the choruses, the music became something more akin to white noise. Musically pointless, but perhaps emotionally still of value. The Gurre-Lieder being a work that overpromises and underdelivers, needs more of a performance to truly thrill – and most of all a different venue^*.

^*Apparently, that is where the performance had been planned to take place, until the VSO changed its mind (not to say reneged on a done deal) and went for the pre-inaugural concert at the Gurre-Lieder’s birthplace.

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