Oelze

Rediscovering a great composer is possible with the new GENUIN album of works by Maria Herz. She was born in Cologne in 1878 and died in New York in 1950. The singer Christiane Oelze, the Asasello-Quartett, and the E-MEX-Ensemble for New Music have partnered up to present a cross-section of the work of the Jewish composer, who used at times the pen name Albert Maria Herz. From arrangements of Bach to lieder as well as string quartets and mixed chamber music, the works span stylistically from the enthusiasm for baroque music of the 1920s to free tonality. All this is excitingly new, well worth hearing, and recorded superbly!

Christiane Oelze is one of the leading German sopranos to have emerged in the latter decades of the 20th century. Her repertory includes a broad range of works in the operatic, concert, and lieder realms by composers, including J.S. Bach, Mozart, Richard Strauss, Schubert, Brahms, Mahler, and Schoenberg. She possesses a bright, somewhat delicate voice whose graceful quality makes her style both uniquely appealing and easily recognizable.

It is almost exactly a quarter of a century since Pierre Boulez recorded his complete Webern survey. This new collection, apart from being useful for anyone who doesn't want to buy three whole CDs of Webern, offers an interesting insight into how Boulez's way with a composer probably more central to him than any other has changed. For a start he gives him a little more time: most of the pieces here are slightly but significantly slower than they were in 1970. This allows lines to be more subtly moulded, phrases to acquire a touch more poise. This is not to say that Boulez has softened and now phrases Webern as though he were Chopin, but grace and even wit (the second movement of the Quartet) are now noticeable alongside his customary precision. The Ensemble InterContemporain have been playing these pieces constantly since they were first founded, and it shows in the absolute assurance of their performances.

JOHN ELIOT GARDINER und ein junges Sängerensemble bezaubern den Hörer: Christiane Oelze ist eine betörend sympatische Pamina. So gestochen scharfe und dabei klangvolle Koloraturen wie von Cyndia Sieden habe ich so noch nicht gehört; eine Königin der Extraklasse! Auch Michael Schade als Tamino und Gerald Finley als Papageno bestechen mit ihren wohlkingenden und ausdrucksfähigen Stimmen.

Curated by leading musicologist and writer Nigel Simeone, Decca and DG's 20C series is devoted to the compositional high points of the 20th Century, presenting a comprehensive overview of classical music from an often-turbulent era. Volume One is a 28-CD set that features 26 iconic works by 26 composers from 1900-1949 and includes a timeline of musical premieres from that period with repertoire notes by Simeone.

Jephtha, first performed in 1752, was Handel’s last major work, written while he was struggling with poor health and failing eyesight. Yet the score contains some of his most powerful and moving music, notably the chorus’s bleak paean to blind faith, ‘How dark, O Lord, are Thy decrees!’ Jephtha is also one of his more operatic oratorios and, if many Baroque operas require the suspension of disbelief, this libretto (by Thomas Morell) may need modern listeners to suspend their distaste at the perversities of its 18th-century pietism. Handel’s wonderfully humane music cuts through all such sanctimony, however, as if – as the Handel scholar Winton Dean has argued – in highlighting the themes of personal suffering and capricious fate, Handel implicitly ‘makes Jehovah the villain of the piece’.

With stiff competition from Norrington on EMI and Östman on L’Oiseau-Lyre, Gardiner’s Magic Flute enters the period instrument stakes somewhat belatedly. It offers no major musicological revelations – no reinstated numbers or serious reorderings that often come with period Mozart these days. Its only textual novelties are the trumpets and drums at the start of Act I, where in accordance with Mozart’s original manuscript Tamino is pursued by a lion rather than a snake, and a selection of numbers, presented as an appendix, sung to the alternative texts given in the first printed score.

This is a rather brisk reading of Brahms' masterpiece, the most ambitious work in his output and one of the greatest compositions of its type. Though Herreweghe's tempos often pushed the music to its limits here (except for the first section), the performance never actually sounded fast, or at least not offensively fast. In fact, it challenges the Levine/RCA effort.

This disc represents Volume 2 of a set of the complete Beethoven symphonies currently in progress (the first volume, on the Talent label, included Symphonies 4 and 7 and was reviewed by Colin Anderson in 29:2). In a clumsily translated note Herreweghe refers to “nature” trumpets and “Baroque kettle drums with modern tuning”; these would appear to be the only concessions to period practice—by all accounts, the Royal Flemish orchestra employs modern instruments. This series would appear, then, to be comparable to the latest set conducted by Roger Norrington, with the orchestra of the Stuttgart Radio, on Hänssler.