Alexander Zemlinsky composed his Lyric Symphony op. 18 for soprano, baritone and orchestra during his time as musical director of the New German Theatre in Prague, where he had moved in 1911 from Vienna. It was generally regarded as his corresponding equivalent to Mahler’s Lied von der Erde (C210021) and is based on Nobel Prize laureate and most important representative of modern Indian literature Rabindranath Tagore. The work is combined with the befriended and three years older ‘phantasmogorist’ Franz Schreker’s Prelude to a Drama, which is a version of the overture of his Die Gezeichneten. It might be considered symptomatic for the most notable characteristic of Schreker’s music: the dominance of chordal sounds over the melodic element.

REVIEW:

Zemlinsky’s seven-movement Lyric Symphony lays claim to being his best-known work and is certainly the only one to attract a significant number of prominent conductors. This live account from Vienna in 1989 was Gielen’s second recording of the work, and it finds him in prime form. He leads a powerful orchestral reading that is all the more impressive because Vienna’s proficient Radio Symphony was the last orchestra I expected to be virtuosic. Every section is totally committed to the score’s voluptuous passions, however, and the recorded sound from Austrian Radio is wonderfully clear and vivid, no small achievement where Zemlinsky’s dense orchestration is concerned.

In the soprano part the choice has typically been big, dramatic voices on the order of Deborah Voigt and Alessandra Marc. Karen Armstrong can’t compete in that league, and wisely she doesn’t try to. By not pushing her voice, singing the chromatic lines accurately, and paying attention to the verse, she delivers a more than respectable performance. But realistically neither singer has the most beautiful or distinctive voice. Orfeo supplies no texts or translations, which means that this recording can only be supplementary to one that does. There are enough drawbacks, despite Gielen’s outstanding conducting, to place this release somewhere in the middle of the pack.

The pairing of Franz Schreker’s 20-minute Prelude to a Drama from 1914 isn’t a new addition to Gielen’s discography, since it also served as the filler to his Mahler Fourth Symphony. The Prelude is rich in themes and incidents, and so skillfully structured that it can be analyzed as a sonata movement. Schreker was a colorist, as he described himself: “I am a sound artist, a phantasmagorist of sound, a sound-aesthete, and there’s not a trace of melody in me.”

The music is lovely, and Gielen’s performance glows with ardent feeling, not a mode I associate with him.

For me the evocation of history hangs heavily over this release, but it holds considerable musical rewards, too, especially for aficionados of an aesthetic doomed to be wiped out through political denunciation.

-- Fanfare (Huntley Dent)

Der ferne Klang by Franz Schreker (1878-1934) premiered on August 18, 1912 at the Frankfurt Opera House. Schreker had already begun composing his first full-length opera in 1901, after the text he had written in just a few weeks. Now the work, which was initially considered impossible to perform, but which made Schreker suddenly famous, is returning to the location of it's premiere for the first time after 1945. Almost half of all operas by the Austrian, who with one exception was both composer and librettist for all of his stage works, performed or premiered in Frankfurt. The Choir of the Oper Frankfurt and Frankfurter Opern- und Museumsorchester perform under the direction of Sebastian Weigle.

"Oper Frankfurt is arguably the “right” company to produce this Der ferne Klang recording, because Austrian composer Franz Schreker (1878-1934) had a special connection with this opera house. It was here that he scored his first big success with this opera, followed by the premiere of his complete version of Die Gezeichneten, two of his most definitive works. His musical idiom is decidedly Late/Post Romantic, yet uniquely his own, beguiling in its lush and translucent tone colours. His style can also extend into an intensely expressionistic and harmonically adventurous, if unsettling, musical soundscape. At the height of his fame during the early years of the Weimar Republic, Schreker was the most performed opera composer after Richard Strauss. He was also a noted pedagogue, as director of Berlin’s Hochschule für Musik, and counted Berthold Goldschmidt and Ernst Krenek as his students. But by the late 1920s, with the rise of National Socialism and its inherent antisemitism, Schreker, who was Jewish, lost his academic appointments and his compositions were banned. Sadly he descended into obscurity, suffered a stroke and died at the age of 56. It was only in the 1980s, through Decca’s “Entartete Musik” series, that Schreker reemerged from a decades-long obscurity. His revival gathered momentum both in Germany and America. Salzburg Festival’s striking 2005 Die Gezeichneten garnered critical and audience accolades, reaffirmed by the more recent Warlikowski production in Munich, which made a powerful (if nightmarish) impression on me in 2017...

Thankfully, Oper Frankfurt’s production of Der ferne Klang was revived before COVID shut everything down, and it is now commercially available on CD. It features a strong ensemble cast led by tenor Ian Koziara and soprano Jennifer Holloway as the two lovers. Both sing beautifully, with Koziara taking top vocal honours for his free, beautiful, never stentorian, ringing tone. Holloway is equally impressive, a few fleeting moments of steely sound notwithstanding.

This recording includes no less than three Canadians— bass-baritone Gordon Bintner, baritone Iain MacNeil, and mezzo Julia Dawson—all members of the Oper Frankfurt Ensemble. Bintner, as the Graf, has the most music to sing, including a very nice aria, “In einem Lande,” which he handles beautifully, particularly at the top. MacNeil and Dawson have less to sing but both offer fresh voices and vivid imagination. All supporting roles are well taken, perhaps with one painful exception. I debated whether to mention it as it involves a singer I have admired in the past. I heard soprano Nadine Secunde (Alte Frau Mama) as a marvelous Sieglinde and Elsa 30 years ago. Here she is in shockingly poor vocal estate, afflicted by a painful wobble —perhaps in character for an ‘Old Lady’, but does it have to be this way? Sebastian Weigle shows his fine understanding of Schreker, leading the Frankfurt forces with strength and eloquence— the Zwischenspiel in Act III is a highlight. This piece might not delight everybody, but if you are fond of Strauss and early Schoenberg, and have an inclination to stories with a Freudian bent, you are in for a treat.

The opera’s story has little to do with logic, yet is strangely suited to Schreker’s lush and atmospheric score. As the listener, one takes a journey of poetic imagination that’s oddly satisfying. This is a perfect opera to illustrate that one should listen not with the head but with the heart. As with a lot of Schreker, the visual element is important, if not crucial, to the total enjoyment of the work, so it’s regrettable that this isn’t a DVD release. That said, it is still very enjoyable and an important addition to the discography of a much neglected composer. Highly recommended." —— Joseph So

Silenced - Unsung Voices of the 20th Century, featuring tenor Ian Koziara and pianist Bradley Moore, shines a light on art songs by composers Franz Schreker, Vitezslava Kapralova, Viktor Ullmann, and Alexander von Zemlinsky, whose musical achievements were overshadowed by the oppression of the Third Reich. This recording marks the first time many of these art songs, traditionally performed by sopranos, are being recorded in the tenor voice.

Described as "an exciting Wagner tenor" (New York Times) and "a wonderful artist" (Washington Post), Chicago native Ian Koziara has performed at leading venues worldwide, including the Metropolitan Opera, Carnegie Hall, Glimmerglass, Teatro La Fenice, and Opera National du Capitole, among others. He sings regularly at Oper Frankfurt, where he recently starred in Franz Schreker's Der ferne Klang.

Bradley Moore has served as associate Music Director at the Houston Grand Opera and assistant conductor at the Metropolitan Opera and Salzburg Festival. He has performed as a piano soloist with orchestras including the National Symphony Orchestra and Buffalo Philharmonic, and has collaborated in recital with artists such as Renée Fleming and Susan Graham.

This recording explores the operatic and chromatically rich German harmonies of early 20th-century composers Franz Schreker (1878-1934) and Alexander von Zemlinsky (1871-1942), alongside the esoteric textures of Viktor Ullmann (1898-1944), who wrote his Holderlin-Lieder and Drei Lieder, Op. 37 during his internment at the Terezin concentration camp. Vitezslava Kapralova (1915-1940), the least known and shortest-lived composer on the program, was a trailblazer as the first Czech woman to become a professional conductor and the first woman ever to conduct the Czech Philharmonic. Kapralova possessed extraordinary talent and technical virtuosity, and her passion for song and poetry are reflected on this program in sets such as Dve pisne, Op. 4 and Jablko s klina, Op. 10. Tragically, Kapralova's career was cut short by her untimely death at age 25.