No two works in Schoenberg’s output better illustrate the scale of the musical journey he undertook in the first decade of the 20th century than Pelleas und Melisande and Erwartung. Just six years separate the composition of his first score for full orchestra and his first venture into music theatre, yet the stylistic distance between them is vast. The symphonic poem, which follows the narrative of the same Maeterlinck play that provided the source for Debussy’s great opera just a few years earlier, is still informed by the language of late romanticism, and in its orchestral colouring especially, makes its debt to Richard Strauss obvious. In fact, Strauss had suggested the play to Schoenberg as a subject when the two composers met in Berlin in the winter of 1901. Erwartung, on the other hand, is often seen as the epitome of musical expressionism, a psychological monodrama that depicts a woman in a nightmarish world of paranoia and rejection, which is mirrored in music from which almost all the old certainties of tonality have leached away.
Some of the finest recorded versions of Pelleas und Melisande – such as the classic ones conducted by John Barbirolli and Herbert von Karajan – place the work firmly within the context of its 19th-century heritage, but Edward Gardner’s performance finds more connections than usual with the later Schoenberg – and specifically with Erwartung. He keeps the music’s sumptuousness on a tight rein, favouring tempi that are faster than most interpreters, distinctly quicker even than the readings from Pierre Boulez and Robert Craft. But he makes sure the shape of the huge musical structure is never compromised, and there’s no lack of tonal weight when required from the Bergen Philharmonic, who are equally convincing when conjuring the febrile web of instrumental lines that surround the protagonist in the monodrama.
Sara Jakubiak is a compelling soprano soloist too, far less histrionic and squally than some, giving a smooth contour to the vocal lines but never depriving them of dramatic intensity.
This week’s other pick
Completed in 1899 and 1912 respectively, Elgar’s Sea Pictures and The Music Makers (Onyx) bracket the two Schoenberg scores chronologically, but seem to belong to an earlier age altogether. With Kathryn Rudge as the velvety mezzo soloist, joined in The Music Makers by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Choir, the two works make a good addition to Vasily Petrenko’s Elgar series with the Liverpool orchestra for Onyx. Petrenko is no more successful than other conductors in making a truly convincing case for The Music Makers, but his performance has its fair share of moments of great eloquence and beauty, and the RLPO’s playing is always wonderfully refined.
