In his Rendering, Luciano Berio takes Schubert’s incomplete Symphony No. 10 as a starting point, interspersing the sketches with his own trademark modernist devices: tonal dissolution, rhythmic and metric disintegration, and jarring orchestral eruptions. While there’s little that’s new on Berio’s part, the idea of a complete Schubert Tenth (no matter how contrived) is tantalizing, and Schubert’s melodies are so engaging that the piece works in spite of its obviousness.
Aribert Reimann’s Metamorphosen on a Menuet by Franz Schubert subjects fragments of the master’s melody to a series of modernist paroxysms. It’s all quite inventive, with much clever orchestration, even if it sounds like poor Schubert slipping in and out of a syphilitic dementia. There’s nothing discernible of Schubert’s song in Hans Werner Henze’s Der Erlkönig, coming as it does from a 1962 ballet, part of which was originally based on Goethe’s poem. Instead we get a brief, frenzied orchestral ostinato notable for its glittering colors and abrupt ending.
Hans Zender makes no changes to the notes and text of Schubert’s choral songs. However by setting them in avant-garde accompaniments he creates a disorienting ghostly effect, as if we were hearing these pieces performed by departed spirits in a haunted castle. Tudor’s spacious, richly reverberant recording only enhances this impression.
Finally, Kurt Schwertsik’s initially somber Epilog might seem like a downer when played at the end of Schubert’s Rosamunde (as it was intended). But in the current context, with its dramatic build-up and seamless aggregation of the old and the new, primarily tonal language, it makes a fitting end to this varied but never uninteresting program. Jonathan Nott leads tenor Carsten Süss and the Bamberg Symphony Chorus and Orchestra in committed, wholly persuasive performances. Schubertians who can take a little “ear-stretching” will find this disc intriguing, as will modern music aficionados.
