Neue Weltordnung, Kissinger

Christoph Willibald Gluck was severely annoyed. He was now 60, and still had to deal with the same annoyances he had for decades: the turbulent life at the Paris Opera, for which he was always writing new stage works, the many rehearsals with petulant divas, the orchestra musicians, with whom Gluck was rarely satisfied. According to contemporary witnesses, he had to retire to the sickbed for a while due to exhaustion. Here he dreamt up a dream world: an opera radically freed of ballast, without ballet, without a large chorus, with only a few performers and a greatly reduced orchestra.

Lobgesang, Mendelssohn's ''Hymn of Praise'', is no longer a rarity on disc, with a dozen versions listed. That makes it timely that Spering, following up the success of Herreweghe's Harmonia Mundi version of Elijah (4/94), here presents a performance in period style. When the composer's preference for fast speeds is well documented, and has so convincingly been followed up by his latterday successor at the Leipzig Gewandhaus, Kurt Masur, it is perhaps surprising that Spering is far more relaxed in his choice of tempos. His overall timing—64'48'' as against Masur's 58'32''—shows what a wide discrepancy there is, and in no way does he let the music drag or become sentimental. For with clean, crisp textures this is a most refreshing performance, full of incidental beauties, of a work that for several generations was regarded as too sweet on the one hand, over-inflated on the other. Spering's clean directness and his obvious affection for the music reverses that jaundiced judgement.