Boris Blacher

*  Romeo and Juliet

David Robinson (Romeo),
N'Kenge Simpson (Juliet),
Chesapeake Chamber Orchestra/Jeffrey Silberschlag.
Albany TROY1008  Total time: 71:47

Summary for the Busy Executive: Greater woe, confin'd.

Boris Blacher, born in China to Baltic-German parents, studied
mathematics and architecture in Berlin, but soon switched to music. 
He became very active in the Berlin music scene of the Twenties and
Thirties and in 1938 became director of a composition class at the Dresden
Conservatory.  However, his Modernist tendencies -- including flirtations
with jazz -- as well as his opposition to the Third Reich's cultural
policies put him crosswise with the Nazis, and he lost his appointment,
as well as most of his living.  The Nazis also accused his music of
Jewishness.  For all I know, Blacher may have been Jewish, but Grove
doesn't mention it, nor can I find information on where and how he spent
the war.  Unfortunately, you didn't have to be a Jew to be "Jewish." To
the Nazis, it was not only "racially" determined but also a state of
mind.  Still, as bad as the war years may have been for Blacher, I doubt
he ended up in Auschwitz or Buchenwald.

Blacher soaked up influences like a sponge.  You can hear bits of Weill,
Stravinsky, Hindemith, and even Milhaud in his pre-war work.  After the
war, dodecaphony attracted him, but not as a way to undermine tonality.
It was the new possibilities of order that he felt drawn to.  At any
rate, a strong Stravinskian neoclassic element -- unusual in a German
composer of that generation -- adheres to his music throughout his career.

Blacher's Romeo and Juliet (in German, Romeo und Julia) comes from 1943.
Although it premiered in 1947, Blacher needed plenty of courage to tackle
such a subject.  Far from the moony-swoony love extravaganza takes on
the play popular during the Twenties and Thirties (see any number of
Little Rascals shorts as well as the Cukor movie with Leslie Howard and
Norma Shearer), Blacher so cuts and trims the play that it becomes a
discourse on the tyranny of the mob, a huge risk during the Third Reich.
This results in a late Zeitoper -- that Weimar-Republic genre which
included Krenek's Jonny spielt auf and Hindemith's Neues von Tage --
disguised as a "German" classic (the Germans have never been able to
fully accept that Shakespeare was English).  Blacher's adaptation is
theatrically brilliant and dramatically concentrated.  A pageant of a
play becomes performable by six singers, a narrator, and an instrumental
ensemble of nine players.  I have nits to pick with Blacher's setting
of Shakespeare -- occasionally, his declamation makes nonsense of the
text (perhaps at the time, he wasn't fluent in English) -- but overall
he strikes a really good balance between pure singing and plot advancement,
just as Monteverdi said a composer should.

The music roams all over the map of High Modernism: cabaret, jazz, and
the usual suspects, mainly Stravinsky and Hindemith.  However, he tempers
the range of allusion with great elegance and craft.  For the prologues
to the three acts, Blacher writes in pop, quasi-blues idiom -- a wonderful
conceit.  The music moves with energy and purpose, driving to the
conclusion on a fast, straight track.

I wish the performance matched the music.  I find only one decent voice
in the bunch -- N'Kenge Simpson, the Juliet.  Everyone else sounds too
vocally young or too vocally tired and dull.  Silberschlag, a fine
trumpeter, achieves a sharp ensemble but can't generate much excitement,
probably because the voices get in the way.

In short, this CD won't please everybody.  I recommend it to those
interested in Blacher and Modern opera, rather than in glorious singing
and heightened drama.  What we really need is another, better performance,
which, of course, will appear after I am dead.

Steve Schwartz

             ***********************************************
The CLASSICAL mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R)
list management software together with L-Soft's HDMail High Deliverability
Mailer for reliable, lightning fast mail delivery.  For more information,
go to:  http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html