You never get the impression that Arnold Schoenberg was a happy composer, and nowhere is the lack of joy more evident than in his choral music. With a few small exceptions, from Friede auf Erden (1907) to his last choral piece, De profundis (1950), he pursued a style that was stringently, stubbornly inconsiderate of the practicalities of producing pitch-accurate sounds with human rather than mechanical instruments. The first performance of the originally a cappella Friede auf Erden (four years after the work was completed) required instrumental help–in a reluctant nod to claims of the piece being “unsingable”, the composer made a new version for choir and chamber orchestra. This recording smartly offers both versions for purposes of completeness and comparison. (On Harmonia Mundi, Kent Nagano and the Berlin Radio Choir include both the original a cappella work and a very satisfying setting for orchestra alone, framing a performance of Schoenberg’s unfinished Die Jakobsleiter.)
Schoenberg was famously disappointed to discover the “limitations” of singers in realizing his expressionistic and later dodecaphonic creations. And although he conceded certain necessary accommodations for the sake of performance, for the most part he chose to keep his vocal writing on the outer fringes of performability, scoring parts in a manner comparable to a scientist combining molecular substances whose properties repel rather than attract each other. Indeed, even today few choirs program his works, and regardless of where you stand on the philosophical issues regarding a composer’s creative purpose, the fact is, the severe technical difficulties inherent in Schoenberg’s choral music, along with (and perhaps even more importantly) its frequent ugliness and relentless acerbity, continue to ensure most of these works’ irrelevance except for theoretical/musicological reasons.
Lest we forget that there’s a recording here waiting to be reviewed–the choral selections receive first-rate readings by the outstanding Accentus chamber choir, and if you’re looking for reliable renditions of both Friede auf Erden settings, these will do nicely. The tempos are relatively slow and carefully-paced, but there’s decent clarity in the textures and balances are well-managed. Further, the choir exhibits an appropriately full-bodied, Romantic tone quality in Friede auf Erden and the folksong settings and a harder, more austere character in the harsh and turbulent De profundis and in Franck Krawczyk’s transcription for wordless voices of the eerie atmosphere of Farben.
Most of this is not easy music for the singers, nor is it particularly comfortable listening–but occasionally, as with the folksong setting Schein uns, du liebe Sonne, which shows Schoenberg could write beautiful and emotionally affecting, really singable music, or Dreimal tausend Jahre, where he manages to achieve a strange yet somehow agreeable serenity with serial techniques, we find some shining nuggets of gold. The voices make a uniquely compelling case for Krawczyk’s conception in Farben, and the male chorus Verbundenheit (from the Op. 35 set) is also worth hearing more than once.
Sonically, the recording presents no problems–except for one. Apparently for balance, or to provide chronological context or continuity, Schoenberg’s Op. 9 Chamber Symphony appears in the middle of the program. Not only is this the disc’s only purely instrumental piece, but it was recorded at a different time and place from the choral works–and it’s somewhat of a klunker, with ultra-close miking and a confined spatial ambience that sounds more like it was recorded in the early-1950s rather than 2005! It’s really a very good piece–and presumably very well played, except with such skewed balances it’s hard to make a conclusive judgement. Given the intervening decades since most of these works were written, Schoenberg’s choral music doesn’t sound nearly so “modern” or revolutionary or radical as it once did, but neither has its predominant dissonance and dysfunctional harmony become any more compelling for singers.
