There have been a number of occasions in the past few decades when it seemed as if the music of Alexander Zemlinsky would finally receive the attention it deserves. As Arnold Schoenberg’s teacher and first brother-in-law, and one of Alma Schindler’s pre-Mahler lovers, Zemlinsky may always get at least a few lines in histories of fin-de-siecle German romanticism, but his own works have been less consistently discussed.
A flurry of interest in the 1980s and 90s resulted in the publication of a definitive life and works and recordings of all of the operas, two of which, the one-acters A Florentine Tragedy and The Dwarf, looked likely for a while to become repertory pieces. But that enthusiasm has since cooled, and outside Germany and Austria none of his music is regularly heard now, not even his best-known score, the Lyric Symphony, nor the sumptuous “fantasy in three movements” Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid), based upon Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale.
Listening to this fine new recording from Marc Albrecht and the Netherlands Philharmonic, the neglect of Seejungfrau seems particularly baffling. It was first performed in 1905, in a concert that also included the premiere of Schoenberg’s equally massive symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande, though it’s less adventurous harmonically than his pupil’s score. Though Zemlinsky’s music would later become more obviously modernist, the language of Seejungfrau is firmly late Romantic and gloriously expansive, not very distant sometimes from the world of Strauss’s tone poems.
For sheer tonal allure Albrecht’s performance can’t quite match the two available from Riccardo Chailly and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (on Decca and the orchestra’s own label), but it’s still powerful enough to convince any sceptics that this is a score that deserves much more than the occasional dutiful revival.
This week’s other pick
The three symphonies by Max Bruch belong to an earlier and very different strand of German Romanticism from Zemlinsky. Like so much of Bruch’s music they are in thrall to Brahms; the first symphony, completed in 1868, was dedicated to him, though the music actually seems more indebted to Mendelssohn and Schumann. It’s easily the least convincing of the three; in their quiet way the second and third, finished in 1870 and 1887 respectively, are much more rewarding, and need just the kind of sympathetic handling they get from Robert Trevino and the Bamberg Symphony. Their two-disc CPO set also includes overtures and orchestral interludes from Bruch’s operas and oratorios.
