Schoenberg: Gurrelieder
Sir Simon Rattle/Berlin Philharmoniker
EMI 57303

Before Schoenberg yielded his super-abundance to God, there was the
concept of Gurrelieder.  It's the only reason I trust him; the only reason
his later works stay in my collection and get taken for a drive once and
awhile.  The composition was completed, (with the exception of the final
chorus), in 1901and the ensuing orchestration was slow-going:  Schoenberg
set the work aside in 1903 and then finally took it up again in 1910,
finishing the remainder of Part III and recasting some earlier stretches.
By this time the revolution of his own making was well behind him.

How hard it must have been to come back to a piece seven monumental years
later and recapture the orchestrational spirit of a younger self.  It's
not just a matter of the older Schoenberg having gained the technique
to paint with more vividness and intensity - he was pretty damn good early
on!  - the composer had also developed an entirely new way of looking at
orchestration.  Those huge old swaths of sweat-stained and love-spattered
red velvet - posthumously limned with the shiny rivets and staples of a new
era - could have looked pretty absurd if it were anyone other than
Schoenberg at the workbench.  Oh, how it works.

I have heard Ozawa's and Sinopoli's performances but it is the
Chailly/London that I'm most intimately familiar with and therefore the
one I will use to compare and contrast with Rattle's new recording.  What
of Rattle's new recording with the Berlin Philharmonic? In two words:  slow
and micromanaged.  The Berliners play beautifully, voices are flatteringly
recorded, and the sound stage expands as amply as one could want during
climaxes, but I must report that Chailly's way with phrasing, dynamic
gradations, hues, and tempi sweep me along in a way that Rattle's does not.
Yes - Decca's recording for Chailly can sound claustrophobic at points,
and Siegfried Jerusalem's voice can be uncomfortably up-front, but for me
Chailly and his musicians "touch the infinite" in a way that eludes Sir
Simon.

Both capture the delicate nocturnal machinations of nature in the
orchestral introduction, but with Rattle's slow speeds the music's lilt is
hardly perceptible, and the long-limbed phrases fall apart, at least for
this listener.  Chailly's brisker tempo helps to keep phrases intact and
his attention to dynamic ebb and flow lends so much to my impression of
forward momentum.  The first couplet of songs, (S.  Jerusalem Dunn for
Chailly, Thomas Moser and Karita Mattila for Rattle), is the music of
stillness - our lovers turn inward while contemplating Nature in all
her glory.  While Moser and Mattila are ostensibly expressive, listen
to how Jerusalem and especially Dunn weave in and out of Schoenberg's
kaleidoscopic textures - brushing the sound here, floating above the
orchestra there - I find their performances compelling.  Rattle's slow
tempo and seemingly willful ritardandi often break the spell for me.

The next couplet of songs, tempestuous in nature and thickly orchestrated,
fare much better in the Rattle recording.  Rattle does wonders bringing
out the mammoth, yet quicksilver textures of Schoenberg's accompaniment
with clarity, and Moser's high B natural is much more tolerable than
Jerusalem's; but Rattle's and Moser's impatience seems a little contrived,
while Chailly and Jerusalem let loose.  (And, unlike Chailly's Decca
recording, those percussion-laden orchestral climaxes have plenty of
room to breathe, thanks to EMI's recording team.)

The concluding songs, leading up the the Song of the Wood Dove, just get
better and better in their expression of the joyous delirium of nascent
love.  Anyone who has experienced true joy knows that it comes as a
vaguely unsettling surprise, as does our foreknowledge of joy's ephemeral
nature....  To paraphrase Pablo Neruda:  "la fatiga sigue, y el dolor
infinito" ("weariness follows, and the infinite ache").  While Mattila's
voice for Rattle is undeniably beautiful, listen to how Dunn, in song
seven, colors her desire with wonder and trepidation by turns, making
her Tove so much easier to relate to.  Chailly is right there with her
and so much more successful than Rattle in the segment that closes the
song:  the arching string melodies that suddenly evaporate into percussive
adumbrations of death - purple flushed lips pulled apart to reveal
chattering teeth; and then those bitonally employed harps, stings, and
mallet instruments--listen specifically to track 7/Decca @3:13 - they
sound like the tingling of skin.

Is there any more ecstatic moment in music than the climax of song nine,
upon the words, "dying in a rapturous kiss?" While there's nothing wrong
with Mattila's performance, listen to how Dunn moves from earth-shaking
ardor to tremulous wonder and then perfectly dispatches that final high
B natural with such abandon that I can only shake my head in gratitude.
(Track 9/Decca.) In Waldemar's "afterglow" song, song ten, Rattle and Moser
perform it tenderly, but in the present tense; while Chailly and Jerusalem
foreshadow the music with a touching sense of sadness as well - they
capture that "infinite ache."

In the Song of the Wood Dove, (I played piano in the chamber version
of this work last year), Schoenberg jumps ahead stylistically.  Rattle
highlights the new, while Chailly perfumes Schoenberg's novel sounds with
a bucolic fragrance that, to my ears, helps keep the song in step with the
rest of the piece.  Chailly's arrival of the Falcon is truly overwhelming
in its sense of terrible majesty.

And so it goes.  As you can see, I might as well be King Waldemar and
Sir Simon Rattle might as well be my abandoned queen at this point.  I am
ending my thoughts here, as Part I holds the most valuable music for me,
and nothing Rattle has done in Part II and III has cast a new light - in
other words - changed the way I hear Part I in any kind of a revelatory or
persuasive way.

John Smyth