Critic’s Notebook: Spring Funeral – from Zemlinsky, for Alfred Brendel

Also published in Die Presse: Brendel-Gedenken im Musikverein: Bruckner-Messe unter Lorenzo Viotti

A.Zemlinsky, Spring Funeral et al. Edith Mathis, Roland Hermann Antony Beaumont, NDRSO Capriccio

J.Haydn, Symphonies No.103/104 Sally Mattews, K.Cargill, I.Arcayürek, S.Trofimov M.Jansons / BRSO & Chor BR Klassik

With Zemlinsky’s funeral ode and Bruckner’s F minor Mass, his concert by the Wiener Singverein — aided and abetted by the Vienna Symphony under Lorenzo Viotti — became something of a a secular requiem for the late pianist.

Outside, summer had already announced itself in Vienna. Inside the Musikverein, Tuesday night’s audience was greeted with “The Funeral of Spring.” That would have been apt on seasonal grounds alone. As it happened, the programming of this rarely performed work by Alexander Zemlinsky — written by the 26-year-old Bruckner student in memory of the recently deceased Brahms — turned out to be sadly more appropriate still: just before the concert began, news trickled in of Alfred Brendel’s death.

The Musikverein's intendant Stephan Pauly said a few words of remembrance and the concert was dedicated to the iconic pianist. Imagine if Julius Fučík’s Entry of the Gladiators had been scheduled to open the evening. (Although, with Brendel’s dry, mischievous wit, that might have suited him perfectly. One can vividly picture the twinkle in his eye.)

The fact alone that the "Frühlingsbegräbnis" was performed at all deserves praise — before a single note sounded. This work, initially reminiscent of both Mendelssohn and Brahms, painted in bold strokes on a giant canvas, with oversized chorus, full orchestra, and soloists, is quite the experience: romantic, skirting the edge of kitsch, deeply moving — Dante Gabriel Rossetti manifest in music. Baritone Derek Welton delivered his part with relaxed, sonorous authority; soprano Christina Gansch’s voice carried beautifully, too. But the star of the work is the chorus — in this case, the Singverein — who seemed to have declared general mobilization and showed up, visibly and audibly, with every throat on deck.

The second half continued in this grand manner and the same line-up — joined now by mezzo Rachael Wilson and tenor Andrew Staples — for Bruckner’s Mass in F minor. Secular, spectacular, borderline overheated: Bruckner’s Mass has rarely sounded so much like Verdi’s Requiem. Glorious: the hushed, dark opening of the Kyrie, all restrained power. In general, it was the openings and isolated moments — usuually the soft, gentle ones — that stood out: Delicate entries, almost ostentatiously held-back (not always clean, but goosebump-worthy nonetheless), as on the “Crucifixus” in the Credo or in the luxuriant Benedictus.

And then, just as quickly, came the deluge — chorus and orchestra locked in battle for decibel-dominance, akin to King-Kong v. Godzilla, in the reverently trembling Golden Hall. In the first ten rows, ears fluttered in the Brucknerian blast wave. Lorenzo Viotti, striking his 'Cristo Redentor'-pose — arms spread, theatrical, relishing the sound — was clearly in his element. The orchestra supported him in this with vivid, committed playing.

Wilson’s voice was a rich, dark-toned exclamation mark — one could easily imagine her as Erda a few blocks away. Staples sang with an uncommonly natural and clear tone — especially for this role — a welcome contrast to the underlying tension of much of the rest of the performance.

For the curious: the concert airs again on July 29 at 7:30 PM on Ö1. And a little fashion advice: If you like the waistcoat of your three piece suit to go all the way to your neck, so it looks like you are wearing a V-neck sweater (partially necessitated by the narrow cut of the jacket which would otherwise cover the waistcoat altogether: Fine. Personal choice. But the straight/pointed collar with the black bow tie is never going to be a good look, no matter how instagrammable a hunk you might be.


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Dip Your Ears, No. 200 (Schulhoff Symphonies for Voice)

E.Schulhoff + A.Zemlinsky, Two Symphonies for Voice & Orchestra: Menschheit, Landschaften + Six Maeterlinck Songs, M.Tang / R.Stene / Trondheim SO Simax

Voluptuous Melancholy

Landschaften – Symphony for Mezzo and Orchestra, op.26, is a 16-minute orchestral song cycle from 1912 that Schulhoff dismissed later when he changed his style after World War I… but what a glorious work to dismiss! Mahler or Zemlinsky might have been jealous, so expansive in concentrated form, so soaring is this work on five poems of Johannes Theodor Kuhlemann that Schulhoff called a. Schulhoff revisited the idea of a “Symphony for Voice and Orchestra” after the war, when he wrote Menschheit, op.28, with a completely different idea about composing and yet achieved similarly pleasingly late-romantic results.

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Second Opinion: Playing with Mermaids: Conlon and the NSO

Many thanks to Robert R. Reilly for this review from the Kennedy Center..

The only disappointing thing about the evening of Thursday, April 10, 2014 at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall was that it was not full. When the National Symphony Orchestra chooses such interesting repertory as it did for this concert under conductor James Conlon, the musical idealist imagines the place full to the rafters.

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Conlon and 'The Mermaid'

A. Zemlinsky, Die Seejungfrau, Gürzenich Orchester Köln, J. Conlon (EMI, 1997)

James Conlon's stint with the National Symphony Orchestra last week was one of my Top Ten concert picks for the month. There were other assignments in the way for the first two performances, but as noted on Saturday, there was no way I was going to miss the chance to hear Conlon conduct Alexander Zemlinsky's tone poem Die Seejungfrau, at the last performance on Saturday night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. The program was inverted from the usual order of a symphony concert, with the major Zemlinsky work performed first, followed by the concerto and the short piece that would usually be a concert-opener. At the outset, Conlon took microphone in hand and gave a savant and convincing introduction to Die Seejungfrau, speculating that Zemlinsky saw himself in the mermaid and the beautiful and inaccessible Alma Schindler, with whom he was in love, as the unapproachable prince. Alma Schindler -- later Mahler, Gropius, finally Werfel -- provided the common thread of the program, too, as she was the dedicatee of Korngold's violin concerto on the second half, composed when both Korngold and Alma lived in Los Angeles in the 1940s.

Die Seejungfrau is in three movements, which are not identified with elements of the story but correspond roughly as follows: the little mermaid's life in the sea and first encounter with the prince; the spell that transforms her into a human and her attempt to get the prince to marry her; and her ultimate embrace of death, because she will not accept the Mer-Witch's offer to kill the prince and be returned herself to the sea. The first movement evokes the deep rolling of the sea, with static motifs, including deep harp notes, layered on top of groaning bass instruments, leading to huge tidal swells of sound. Concertmaster Nurit Bar-Josef was mercurial and passionate in the violin solos of the little mermaid, numerous enough to make the work almost a sort of violin concerto. Conlon gave the work a decisive pacing, which added gritty excitement to the faster passages. A rollicking horn theme signifies the prince and his men, and a passage of music in the second movement, excised from the score after the work's premiere, has been put back into the score, recovered from the holograph score in the Library of Congress, heard for the first time in the United States in these performances.

As Conlon noted, the second movement has a number of waltzes in it, and the solo violin gets swept up in one of them. If you only know this story from the sanitized Disney movie version, Andersen's mermaid suffers terrible searing pain every time she walks on her magical legs. The Mer-Witch tells her that she will move more gracefully than any human but with this terrible pain, which she endures quite happily for the chance to please the prince. The stakes in the Andersen story are deadly: if a human does not marry her, thereby sharing his immortal soul with her, the soulless mermaid will dissolve into the sea foam. The mermaid's family strikes another pact with the Mer-Witch, trading their hair for an enchanted blade: if the mermaid kills the prince with it, her fish's tail will return and she can go back to the sea. Selflessly, the mermaid throws the knife into the sea, giving up her life, but she joins spirits in the air, who can earn a soul by performing acts to help the living. Zemlinsky's has its eeriest effects in the third movement, including the return of the menacing deep sea music from the opening of the piece, with radiant string strings lifting up the violin solo, with harp twinkles and muted brass, quite ethereal. It is a score that should be on every conductor's To Do list.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, NSO concert stuffed with Romantic music by Zemlinsky, Korngold and Brahms (Washington Post, April 11) Terry Ponick, NSO, James Conlon highlight 20th century’s missing masterpieces (Communities Digital News, April 11) Jesse Hamlin, James Conlon leads musical revival of Nazi-banned composers (San Francisco Chronicle, April 9)

Gil Shaham has been specializing in 20th-century violin concertos, and here he was the soloist for the sugary Korngold concerto. Shaham's tone is often beautiful and his phrasing sensitive, when the sound of the orchestra does not push him too far and the writing is not too high on the E string or otherwise demanding, so the delicate parts of this concerto were lovely, often colored by the celesta, seated right in front of Conlon's podium in this performance. In recent years, though, elements of Shaham's playing have unraveled a bit, and there were some hairy flautando notes here, iffy intonation, and slightly sketchy double-stops -- not enough to make the performance disastrous by any means, but dulling some of its shine. After these two large works, the Brahms "Variations on a Theme by Haydn" were probably unnecessary, especially since it was last heard from the NSO only in 2009, but it offered another chance for the NSO musicians to shine, especially the contraforte player Lewis Lipnick, whose line was given special prominence in the theme and several variations. Conlon kept most of the piece moving along, with a minimum of oozy sentiment to the rubato, making the minore variation (no. 4) legato and smoldering.

The NSO season continues next week, with guest conductor Cornelius Meister leading performances of overly familiar Mendelssohn and Mozart, plus Prokofiev's third piano concerto, with Nikolai Lugansky as soloist (April 17 to 19).

Briefly Noted: 'The Mermaid'

A. Zemlinsky, Die Seejungfrau, Gürzenich Orchester Köln, J. Conlon (EMI, 1997)

James Conlon has devoted much of his career to the revival of forgotten works and composers from the early 20th century. One of those composers is Alexander Zemlinsky, one-time teacher of Arnold Schoenberg and eventually his relative, when Schoenberg married Zemlinsky's sister Mathilde. A little-known tone poem by Zemlinsky, Die Seejungfrau, was given its premiere in 1905, on a concert sponsored by the Society of Creative Musicians that also featured Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande. Zemlinsky's 45-minute work, for a massive orchestra [4 3 4 3 - 6 3 4 1 - timp, perc(2), hp(2), str], is based on the same Hans Christian Andersen story (Den lille Havfrue) that was (loosely) the basis for Disney's film The Little Mermaid, except that in the Danish story the mermaid decides not to stab the prince, who has betrayed her by marrying another woman, opting instead to throw her knife into the sea and dissolve into the air as a sort of benevolent spirit. Conlon was not the first to record this work, but it has become associated with him since this recording with the Gürzenich Orchester Köln. In his concerts with the National Symphony Orchestra this week -- the last performance is this evening -- Conlon is leading the first U.S. performances of a new critical edition of the work, which restores a section of 83 measures cut by the composer after the work's premiere, from the mermaid's visit to the Mer-witch.

According to Antony Beaumont's biography of Zemlinsky, it was Die Seejungfrau "that stole the show" at that 1905 concert: "His diaphanous orchestration teased the ear; the rich harmonies and passionate climaxes gave pleasure, and with his experience as a conductor of operetta, he knew how to articulate the finest nuance, to negotiate the subtlest of rubatos." During the Schoenberg piece, on the other hand, the audience grew restless, and many listeners left. Conlon's recording is well worth revisiting, or hearing for the first time, revealing a work that is in keeping with other fairy-tale music works of the same era, including the Pelléas adaptations by Fauré and Debussy. Listening to it now (see embedded video below), as with many of Zemlinsky's works, it is hard to believe that this composer could have passed into obscurity.

Dip Your Ears, No. 151 (A Trio of Austrian Trios)

K.Goldmark, H.Gál, A.Zemlinsky, Piano Trios, T.A.Irnberger, E.Sinaiski, A.K.Cernitori Gramola SACD

Tempting Trios

We’re at the beginning of a greatly desirable Hans Gál renaissance, and so it was that composer’s piano trio that drew me to this recording from Vienna’s enterprising Gramola label. Bending and twisting with summery delight, the Trio makes no bones about Schubert and Bahms as its musical idols: radical in 1949! Zemlinksy’s Opus Three (with Violin instead of Clarinet) is of darkly Brahmsian beauty, but the real bonbon is Karl Goldmark’s contribution, an ear-worm in-waiting. It’s a Trio that sounds upon third time hearing as if you’ve known it all your life—or should have. The performances are searing.

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Paul Appleby, Sweet and Loud

Read my review published today in the Style section of the Washington Post:

Charles T. Downey, Tenor Paul Appleby hits rough territory in Vocal Arts D.C.’s season finale
Washington Post, May 18, 2011

What a song recitalist sings can be just as important as how it is sung. A case in point was the final recital of the Vocal Arts D.C. season Monday night, which reunited tenor Paul Appleby with pianist and song programming guru Steven Blier. Appleby, familiar to local audiences from his apprenticeship at the Wolf Trap Opera Company, performed a program in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater that showcased his sweet, ringing voice and his showmanship, for better or worse.

Appleby attacked a set of mostly forgettable Italian serenades by Verdi, Mascagni and Pedrotti, with a well-studied sound that became almost a parody of its own stereotypes, all ardent, sobbing tone and scooped attacks. For most of this varied program, he applied the heroic side of his voice, which could command considerable power, with judicious care.

In the second set, though, four intriguing songs by Alexander Zemlinsky sent Appleby’s voice into unpleasant territory; he misjudged the musical style, simply hurling as much sound at them as he could in a way that was more hollering than lyrical. [Continue reading]

Paul Appleby (tenor) and Steven Blier (piano)
Vocal Arts D.C.
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

PREVIOUS REVIEW:
July 2010

The 2011-2012 season from Vocal Arts D.C. will include recitals by Eric Owen (September 10), Mathias Hausmann (October 12), the New York Festival of Song with tenor Paul Appleby and others (October 22), Lydia Teuscher (January 26), Florian Boesch (February 15), Anna Caterina Antonacci (April 11), and Gidon Saks (May 30). Performances will be held at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater or at George Washington University's Marvin Center Theater.

Ionarts-at-Large: A Midget, Frogs, and Broken Tea Cups

A wonderful—because rare and original—double bill at the Bavarian State Opera: Ravel’s L’Enfant et les sortileges and Alexander Zemlinsky’s Der Zwerg. Ravel’s 45-minute tale about the unruly child, its nightmarish-fantastical visions, and eventual repentance is an adorable and lyrical feast for the ears… at least throughout part II, the dream scene in which the animals and pets come to life. Perhaps the most enjoyable aspect of the whole night are the animal costumes Anna Nykowska Duzsynska created for Grzegorz Jarzyna’s production. When Kevin Conners’ Frog gets to give his Squirrel-love Angela Brower a peck, it’s cute enough to make hardened hearts melt—amid very solid singing and a willing, enthusiastic orchestra under Kent Nagano.


Grzegorz Jarzyna opens the opera as a film set where a Walter Felsenstein-esque opera movie of “L’Enfant et les sortileges” is being shot—shown on a wide screen above the set. That would make sense if it had a child movie star gone wild at its center… an obnoxious little brat (as they invariably are) with his tantrums thrown at the stage-trailer, abusing the film crew and director around him. But that’s not the case; the child merely acts its role within the film-within-the-opera. Is it a way to present a realistic version of something unrealistic? Or is the ‘acting’ perhaps the excuse for its behavior and the explanation for its ‘repentance’? If the latter, it would rob the opera of its entire, sole point… so perhaps this first part—also the musically less gratifying—is better not pondered. The costumes are inventive but the characterization of the Wedgewood teapot, for example, is insufferably clownish; some of the voices—the Fire (slightly better, later on, as the Nightingale) and the Kid (Tara Erraught)—were not impressive. All that is forgotten by the time film director and sound technician enter within the dream, metamorphosed as ridiculously adorable fattened prairie dogs or some such creatures.

I love the music of Alexander Zemlinsky (1871 – 1942). How superb to get to hear (!) his third-last opera, “The Dwarf”, (incompetently) adapted from Oscar Wilde’s short story The Birthday of the Infanta. It’s really, really too bad it’s not a particularly good opera. Or at least not a good enough opera to make a lasting impression on stage with a direction that had spent its main ideas on Ravel and gave Zemlinsky a very accomplished, professional treatment but not much imaginativeness. As a stage work, Der Zwerg—lacking that bit of added sophistication that the operas of his contemporary Franz Schreker (1878 – 1934) contain—can’t get by on craftsmanship alone. Fortunately the music can.

Written between 1919 and 1921, there are musically analogous moments to Richard Strauss (melodies for the voices and solo instruments), Gustav Mahler (orchestral color, including the use of mandolin) and Richard Wagner (harmonies). After a few bars of smug marching music, the lyrical, sweet, wallowing, romantic gene of Zemlinsky inevitably breaks through and doesn't leave until that dwarf is stone cold dead.

Zemlinsky adapts the story to whine—for 90 minutes—about how he, Zemlinsky, is ugly and how Alma Schindler (Mahler / Gropius / Werfel) couldn’t possibly love him. It is uninspired stuff that drones on forever as the drawn-out finale is chewed back and forth like cud. As far as autobiographical whining is concerned it’s not as bad as Bernstein’s insufferable Kaddish Symphony, but it’s not exactly dramatically compelling. The text doesn’t seem very naturally set to the music either, and the music is awfully tough for the voices. That John Daszak navigated the uncomfortable part of the Dwarf as well as he did was one of the marvels of the evening; Camilla Tilling’s naïve-yet-calculating infanta Donna Clara—Salome’s childish, dim-witted older stepsister—was a wholly pleasing performance, too. Paul Gay’s Major Domo (Don Estoban) was undermined by his character’s getup; an obnoxiously cliché-drenched freak with a ‘Garry-Oldman-is-Bram-Stoker’s-Dracula’ hairdo. That’s part of the production’s aim, of course: the whole birthday party of the infanta is the actual freak-show; the dwarf is not only regular size but reasonably handsome. His ‘ugly’ is in fact just a being ‘different’. But the grotesque element of the party-folk is so mild that the contrast never really works. Kriegenburg’s Wozzeck (also from the Bavarian State Opera) should have served as an example of how it’s done.

All pictures © Wilfried Hösl, courtesy Bavarian State Opera

Hail, Eschenbach, All Hail

Mozart, Piano Concertos (nos. 9, 19, 21, 23, 27), London Philharmonic Orchestra, C. Eschenbach Zemlinsky, Lyrische Symphonie, M. Goerne, C. Schäfer, Orchestre de Paris, C. Eschenbach (MP3)

In the first year of two new music directors in Washington -- Philippe Auguin at the Washington National Opera and Christoph Eschenbach at the National Symphony Orchestra, both now associated ensembles of the Kennedy Center -- lovers of classical music are stepping into what seems to be a golden age of listening in the nation's capital. Christoph Eschenbach's inaugural season with the NSO has not been without any drawbacks, but a new streak of daring programming reached its apex this month with rarely heard pieces like Roussel's Padmâvatî and Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie. The NSO's part in the Kennedy Center's maximum INDIA festival came to a grand conclusion this week with Alexander Zemlinsky's Lyrische Symphonie, heard at the second performance last night. Sadly, all three of these programs have been largely neglected by the NSO's regular fan base, with a fairly sparse crowd last night and hundreds of tickets unsold for today's matinee.

My suggestion last week for the NSO's programming of Turangalîla, to pair a work less palatable for Washington's conservatively minded audience with something easier to swallow, was actually implemented this week. Unfortunately, the chance to hear Eschenbach both conduct and play the solo part in a Mozart piano concerto -- no. 23 in A major, K. 488 -- was still not enough to draw a large audience. Eschenbach has an alluring way with Mozart, heard in his recordings with the London Philharmonic, and he led a performance that was not without technical shortcomings but was musically captivating. The NSO announced earlier this month that the originally planned concerto, Beethoven's first, had to be changed because Eschenbach was undergoing treatment for severe tendonitis, and even in the Mozart many of the fast passages in Eschenbach's right hand were glossed over just a bit.

No. 23 is a favorite of many pianists: Ingrid Fliter played it with the NSO just last season, and Mitsuko Uchida has just released a new recording of it. Eschenbach gave the score an ultra-emotional, even mannerist performance, twisting and elongating many phrases by stretching the pacing, especially in the slow movement, almost what one imagines a Romantic pianist like Chopin might have done with the work. He selected a rather small number of string players, which created an optimal balance with the woodwinds and horns, which were more present in this arrangement than with a larger orchestra. The first movement had a genial tempo, not too fast, while the second was stretched out almost to the breaking point, and all through Eschenbach emphasized soft, even sotto voce dynamics. Offering a tribute to the people of Japan, Eschenbach and this large chamber group went back for more Mozart, the slow movement of piano concerto no.  12, K. 414.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Eschenbach leads NSO’s first ‘Lyric’ ode to India (Washington Post, March 18) Alex Baker, Goerne, Eschenbach, NSO in Zemlinsky (Wellsung, March 18) Marie Gullard, Songs of sensuality at the Kennedy Center (Washington Examiner, March 19)

As for the main event, this was the first time that the NSO has ever performed Zemlinsky's orchestral song cycle, a setting of seven poems by Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (a German translation based on the poet's own English translation) inspired at least in part by Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde.
the balance problems that reportedly plagued the first performance on Thursday night had been resolved, and with few exceptions both singers could be heard clearly over Zemlinsky's enormous orchestra. Eschenbach brought baritone Matthias Goerne, an Ionarts favorite, from his excellent recording of this work, with the Orchestre de Paris, and he was a suave, virile presence in the male songs of the cycle. One wished for the other half of the recording, Christine Schäfer, especially after our disappointment with Eschenbach's last engagement of Twyla Robinson. The American soprano, however, was in much better form this time, not exactly overpowering the hall but singing with an admirable sense of strength and varied color.

The orchestra seethed and boomed with exotic and, at times, earth-shattering sound, perfectly in sync with their conductor, who led the score with an experienced and clear hand. The poetry is the sort of heavily symbolic, chest-heaving verse perfectly suited to Zemlinsky's harmonically corrupt late Romanticism, a sort of rapturous love encounter with cosmic infinity. He set it with boozy portamenti and tidal swells of orgasmic sighing, culminating in the Wagnerian Liebesnacht of the fourth song. Parts of the soprano solo are cast in a style almost like Sprechstimme, and the conclusion of the final song, sung masterfully by Goerne, was a tender apotheosis.

This concert will be repeated this afternoon (March 20, 1:30 pm), in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

Hartmut Höll Returns to the Kennedy Center

Hartmut Höll (left) with associate artist

In a brilliant programming coup, Washington Performing Arts Society hosted the return of German pianist Hartmut Höll to the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Saturday night. Known for his musical partnerships with baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, violist Tabea Zimmermann, bass René Pape, among others, and a series of recordings with his wife, mezzo-soprano Mitsuko Shirai, the sensitive and elegant pianist was last here for a recital in 2005, also presented by WPAS. In contrast to that more eclectic program, which combined Purcell and Handel with Berg and Schumann, this concert was centered on three composers from the turn of the 20th century: Alexander Zemlinsky, Erich Korngold, and Richard Strauss.

Höll created exotic moods in the opening set, Zemlinsky's Fünf Lieder, from drooping, melancholy themes to chromatic oscillations inspired by the mythologically flavored poetry of Richard Dehmel. He evoked the birdcalls in Heinrich Kipper's poem as set by Korngold in Das Heldengrab am Pruth, heard by the narrator in his "little garden in Bukovina" -- skittering, bitonal squawking in the treble register -- and gave a broad range of color to the reduction of the orchestral postlude to the famous Mariettas Lied, from Korngold's Die tote Stadt. The third set of pieces, a cycle by American jazz composer Brad Mehldau to the poetry of Rilke, called forth even more idioms from Höll, including rock, boogie-woogie, and Gospel. The full orchestra approximated by his hands, in the reduction of Strauss's Gesang der Apollopriesterin, was impressively broad and varied.

Höll's amiable partner was American soprano Renée Fleming, last heard in recital with Höll in 2005 and with the NSO in 2006. In all seriousness, this repertory is the music that suits Fleming's voice the best, and she sang it gorgeously. Her diction and pronunciation may not have been comprehensible at all times, and many of her mannerisms are so famous and associated with the phenomenon of The Beautiful Voice that there is little reason to hope they would ever go away. It is a voice that is elegant in the high passages, can open up to fairly full volume or be pulled back to a ribbon (absolutely radiant in Korngold's Was du mir bist?, for example), and dark and rich enough in the middle and low to accommodate the big leaps in Korngold's Sterbelied. Fleming recorded the Mehldau set on her 2006 album Love Sublime, with the composer at the piano, and her devotion to this music was obvious in the sincerity of her performance, even if it seemed misplaced to these ears.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Opera diva offers a satisfying night at the Kennedy Center (Washington Post, January 10) Patrick McCoy, Soprano Renée Fleming: A Sanctuary of Sound (Washington Examiner, January 10)

Introducing the closing Strauss set, Fleming described Strauss as her "desert island composer," and we have indeed enjoyed her work on this composer's music: the touring performance of Strauss's Daphne and her Four Last Songs, although we had to miss her performance of them with Christoph Eschenbach at the NSO gala this past fall. Her performance in Strauss's Capriccio, heard in Paris in 2004, remains one of the highlights of my opera-going life. The first two songs of this Strauss set, Winterweihe and Winterliebe could not be more suited to a January concert, the former showing how Strauss could push the scope and sweep of a voice to its limits and the latter finding some of the weak points of Fleming's upper range. The encores were easy to predict, with the exception of the first one, the odd choice of an aria from Riccardo Zandonai's Conchita: the Fleming standby (especially if the Mariettas Lied is already on the program) of Puccini's O mio babbino caro, plus two Bernstein chestnuts (I Feel Pretty, which should be forbidden as a soprano encore, and Somewhere) related to La Fleming's recent regrettable forays into jazz and rock music.

The next major vocal event on the calendar is the recital by mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato (February 15, 8 pm), sponsored by WPAS and Vocal Arts D.C. in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

New Opera Notes: Zemlinsky

Zemlinsky, Der Traumgörge, directed by Joachim Schloemer, sets by Jens Kilian, Deutsche Oper, photo by A. T. Schaefer

The Deutsche Oper in Berlin has mounted a production of Zemlinsky's early 20th-century opera Der Traumgörge (The Dream-George). Gustav Mahler intended to premiere this opera in Vienna in 1907, but it was not actually staged until 1980. Shirley Apthorp reviewed it (A storyteller’s troubled dream, June 4) for the Financial Times:

The choreographer and director Joachim Schloemer has struggled so hard to come up with a contemporary take on the piece, rich in meaning and open to a variety of interpretations, that he has rendered the plot, which was confusing enough to begin with, almost entirely unintelligible. Zemlinsky’s opera plays out in a timeless setting of small-town life. Dreamy orphan Görge is more interested in the world of fairy tales than in his bride-to-be, Grete. He runs away before the engagement party. After years of wandering, he finds his dream woman, the social outcast Gertraud. He rescues her from a witch-hunt and brings her to his home town, where all are enthralled by his storytelling and respect him as their leader.

Schloemer sets the action in the broken-down anteroom of a modern- day underground railway. Static escalators, grubby stairs, illuminated announcements (“FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!”) and a couple of bare concrete walls form a space that is halfway to nowhere (sets: Jens Kilian). The villagers of the first act are grey- suited office-workers, the miller and pastor are drunks, Görge drafts film scripts and wears thick glasses.

The second act, Zemlinsky’s exploration of brutality and violence, mingles subcultures of pimps, hippy surfies, puking proletarians and lumpish religious fanatics. Görge is a tramp, his Gertraud a junkie. For the postlude of the couple’s triumphant return home, Schloemer has devised a bizarre bunker of conformist cultism, Stepford Wives meet Jim Jones. The chorus are dressed in identical 1950s leisurewear, and there’s a mass suicide just before the final curtain.

For another viewpoint, George Loomis reviewed the production (Berlin operas: A grim myth and an abstruse fairy tale, June 5) for the International Herald Tribune:

Alexander von Zemlinsky's "Der Traumgörge," or The Dreaming George, an opera about fairy tales from early 20th-century Vienna [is] now in the repertoire of the Deutsche Oper Berlin. Görge's preoccupation with fairy tales, which he believes "must be for real," breaks up his prospective marriage to Grete. But in Act II, which confusingly has almost entirely new characters, he meets Gertraud, whom he eventually recognizes as his fairy princess come to life. Reaching this conclusion is a tortuous process, however, and Zemlinsky's churning chromatic score adds another layer of complexity.

A colleague of Schönberg who never made the break to atonality, Zemlinsky rightly has his champions, but "Der Traumgörge" does not find him at his best, certainly not as a dramatist. Nor does Joachim Schlömer's production supply much in the way of insight. Jens Kilian's set depicts a vast hall with two (nonworking) escalators. It could be an office building housing Görge's potential publisher, for he and his many papers spend a lot of time in the lobby. The staging has a number of perplexing touches, such as having a shopping cart tumble down an escalator, including a quasi-ballet of skateboarders and portraying the citizens of Görge's village as dead in the final scene. The tenor Steve Davislim does yeoman work as Görge and Manuela Uhl brings an arresting dramatic soprano to Gertraud. The conductor Jacques Lacombe stressed clarity of texture over bringing out the colors and passions of the score. But it is doubtful that a more fervent interpretation would have added appreciably to the Deutsche Oper's case for the opera.

Well, I for one would still like to hear this opera. The Deutsche Oper's Web site has more pictures.

Zemlinksy-Dehmel-Schoenberg Montage

Alexander Zemlinsky is one of those B-list composers who may not get much play in the mainstream classical world. Fortunately, at the Temple of Reason known as the Library of Congress, there are people who devote their lives to musical archeology, and in fact their collection has a good number of important Zemlinsky sources. For the library's most recent free concert on Wednesday night, members of a newly formed group from Boston, Montage Music Society, gave a program of music by Zemlinsky and his more famous friend and brother-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg, inspired by the decadent, psychologically charged poetry of Richard Dehmel. The many empty seats were probably left unoccupied by people who feared such a program would consist of atonal and twelve-tone music, but the pieces performed sounded no more chromatic or dissonant than Richard Strauss.

Mezzo-soprano Janna Baty presented two sets of Dehmel songs, five by Zemlinsky and four by Schoenberg, with the group's pianist, Debra Ayers. The Zemlinsky songs were harmonically lush, teetering only occasionally on the chromatic edge, and most of the texts were not particularly shocking. Entbietung, about a man ordering a woman to prepare herself for an amorous night, pulsed with an ostinato figure in the piano accompaniment, the embodiment of a lustful obsession. Perhaps it was just this selection of songs, but Schoenberg, unlike his conservative colleague, seemed to have chosen much more controversial texts. At the end of Erwartung, a woman's pale hand beckons a man into their red villa, ushering in a smutty postlude of corrupt, extended harmony. In Schenk mir deinen goldenen Kahm, Jesus asks Mary Magdalen to give him her colden comb, her silken sponge, and her heart (gasp!).

Baty's powerful voice struck the necessary full-throated Straussian tone at the most demanding moments, like the booming ending of Erhebung, as the narrator's sense of self soars above the clouds toward the sun. The best song, however, was the more expressionistic Warnung, with many hints of the later, atonal Schoenberg. The narrator is a violent, abusive lover, violence incarnated in the jagged piano part. The voice concludes in wild shrieks, as the narrator remembers the dog he poisoned on behalf of the listener. "Du: denk an meinem Hund!" Baty's voice had impressive heft but in the few subtle, quiet moments in these sets, she was less sure.

Other Reviews: Gail Wein, Montage Gives New Life To Zemlinsky's Cello Sonata (Washington Post, October 20)

The instrumental selections began with the North American premiere of Zemlinsky's cello sonata in A minor, a work that was lost for over a century. For cellist Marc Moskovitz, who is working on a biography of Zemlinsky and is a self-confessed "Zemlinsky nut," it was a significant moment. The sonata is a young work, an earnest, Brahmsian exercise in Romantic yearning and musical form. Ayers and Moskovitz gave a performance that, while not perfect, gave a good sense of the piece. The second half was given over to a performance of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night, 1899), an early work for string sextet, arranged for piano trio by Eduard Steuermann. I love this piece, a musical description of the late-night walk and conversation of the man and woman in Richard Dehmel's poem Zwei Menschen (Two people) from the collection called Weib und Welt (Woman and world). Schoenberg finished the piece while on vacation with Zemlinsky and his sister Mathilde, who would become Schoenberg's wife. I was not impressed with this performance, but that is probably because of my memories of the radiant performance of the Vienna Piano Trio at Shriver Hall I heard last February.

Only at the Library of Congress, can the violinist and cellist of a performing group be given Stradivari instruments to play, while a selection of scores and other materials relating to the music played in the concert can be shown in the lobby. (The Library of Congress owns major collections of both Schoenberg and Zemlinsky materials.) There were several letters from Zemlinsky to Schoenberg (all signed "Alex"), printed scores (Zemlinsky's Entbietung and Meeraugen and Schoenberg's Warnung), and manuscripts (including Schoenberg's copy of the original sextet version of Verklärte Nacht and Steuermann's arrangement).

Dip Your Ears, No. 67 (More Zemlinksy)

A.Zemlinksy & A.Enna, Die Seejungfrau & Matchstick Girl, T.Dausgaard, Danish NSO & Chorus Dacapo 8.226048

Seejungfrau, Sinfonietta, J.Conlon, Gürzenich EMI UK | DE | FR Seejungfrau / Symphony in d, A.Beaumont / Czech PO Chandos UK | DE | FR Seejungfrau et al., Dausgaard / Danish RSO Chandos UK | DE | FR

Any mermaid coming my way is highly welcome – and if I have to content myself with Alexander (von) Zemlinsky’s tone poem of that name (as I had to, so far), that’s fine, too. Die Seejungfrau, in its original German title, is 104 years old, but its attraction remains undiminished. Zemlinsky is one of those sadly neglected composers of the turn of the last century who should appeal to all those who like Richard Strauss’s tone poems and Metamorphosen or early Schoenberg (think Verklärte Nacht or Pelleas & Melisande) or Mahler. (Zemlinsky was also the subject of Dip Your Ears, No. 56.)

So far, Chandos has the mermaid market cornered – both Beaumont (esp. on SACD) and Dausgaard (my favorite) have come up with excellent versions that have eclipsed even James Conlon’s EMI recording in my estimation. Here comes Dausgaard’s second recording with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra – this time live and on the Dacapo label. I can’t say it improves on his earlier version or Conlon's or Beaumont's, but it is another exquisite reading and welcome to the catalog. Particularly so, because the mermaid gets the show stolen by the accompanying matchstick girl. August Enna, a Zemlinksy contemporary, makes the latter seem like a super-star of classical music. Few are likely to be familiar with his work – and if, then probably only with his little one-act opera on H. C. Andersen’s tale. Incidentally, that’s a good start – because it’s a 30+-minute work of immense charm. There is Sibelius and R. Strauss washed together with some distinctively Russian opera turns of phrases and a strangely Italianate atmosphere amid the use of Danish tunes. At points during this opera, you would be excused to think La Bohème but with bearable music and delightfully short. Written for orchestra, choir, and two soloists (Inger Dam-Jensen and Ylva Kihlberg are the affectionate sopranos), it's a little gem to be appreciated by anyone whose musical shores it has washed on to.

Those who know well enough to be interested in northern European Romantics (Langgaard, Halvorsen, Nielsen, Norgard, Rautavaara, Ruders, Sibelius, Sinding, Svendsen – to name just a few) but don’t have Den lille pige med svovlstikkerne in their collection yet, this is worth getting just for the Enna. If you are intrigued and inexcusably without a Seejungfrau on your shelves, it might prove the ideal patch.