First review: Gurrelieder at Carnegie Hall

The parish paper has not yet covered Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder at Carnegie Hall. Happily, Susan Hall was there for slippedisc.com:

Gurrelieder, a work that overflows the stage in any large concert hall, was performed by the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein. This is the ASO’s 60th anniversary. Its founder, Leopold Stokowski, premiered Gurrelieder in America in 1932.

Botstein takes the contentious view that Arnold Schoenberg, the work’s composer, was a megalomaniac who thought he could always best his fellow composers with a composition that was bigger, noisier, quieter and more complex than theirs (there is little further evidence of this). The mega-cantata, lasting more than two hours, requires 11 horns, four harps, eight flutes, a standard symphony orchestra doubled. Add choruses and six vocal soloists. It is a miracle that a rich glow emanates from the heart of the saturated strings.

Composing Gurrelieder, Schoenberg creates some of his most beautiful songs. The work was cheered wildly at its 1913 Vienna premiere. Yet the composer resented the applause almost as much as the hostility attracted by his modernism.

The opening is set too low for most tenors and with too loud an orchestra. Dominic Armstrong singing King Waldemar warmed up through the work, displaying a strong helden edge. Soprano Felicia Moore brought huge, colorful tones to the King’s beloved Tove. Mezzo Krysty Swann sang the Wood Dove’s song which concludes Part I. Alan Held boomed out his bass baritone as the Peasant. The court jester (Brenton Ryan) arrived, dashing through the parquet and jumping onto the stage. The chorus gave a magnificent dawn performance.

This work bridges the romantic and the modern, a midpoint between Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and Alban Berg’s Wozzeck.. In a letter to Ferruccio Busoni, Schoenberg wrote: ‘For a human being it is impossible to feel one sensation. One has thousands at once…This variegation, the multifariousness, this illogicity…I would like to have in my music.’

We hear it in Gurrelieder where characters react to the world about them and to their own feelings. The orchestra is a pool from which instrumental solos and ensemble phrases arise. Schoenberg felt that audiences could not give themselves up to his music. Botstein makes it hard to resist. The American Symphony Orchestra swept us up in Schoenberg.

Susan Hall