Erich Wolfgang Korngold
DIE TOTE STADT

Paul – Klaus Florian Vogt
Marietta – Camilla Nylund
Frank / Fritz – Markus Eiche
Brigitta – Sari Nordqvist
Marie – Kirsti Valve
Juliette – Kaisa Ranta
Lucienne – Melis Jaatinen
Victorin – Per-Håkan Precht
Count Albert – Juha Riihimäki
Gaston – Antti Nieminen Finnish National Opera Chorus, Children’s Chorus and Orchestra
Mikko Franck, conductor

Kasper Holten, stage director

Recorded live at Finnish Opera, Helsinki, November 2010

Bonus:
- Cast gallery

Picture format: NTSC 16:9
Sound format: LPCM 2.0 / DTS 5.1
Region code: 0 (worldwide)
Subtitles: English, French, German, Japanese, Korean
Running time: 151 mins
No. of DVDs: 2

Also available on standard DVD

The premiere of Korngold's Die tote Stadt at the Bayerische Staatsoper in 2019 was praised both by press and audiences. Marlis Petersen (Marie/Marietta) and Jonas Kaufmann (Paul) sang the main roles, with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester under Kirill Petrenko's baton, in the intense staging by Simon Stone. After opening night, Joshua Barone wrote in the NY Times: “[The] work's comeback may have reached its peak at the Bavarian State Opera. It’s difficult to imagine a better case for Die tote Stadt than was made in Munich.” The boundary between dream and reality dissolves as Paul, mourning his dead wife Marie, meets the dancer Marietta. With her looks so similar to Marie’s, Marietta becomes the object of the projection of Paul’s erotic desires. Following a nerve-racking “vision”, Paul is finally reeled back to reality and he can leave Bruges as the place of his death cult. The original title of the piece, “Triumph des Lebens”, is symbolic of the main character’s personal development. Just a few weeks before the successful world premiere of Die tote Stadt, none other than Puccini himself described Korngold as the “greatest hope of new German music”. Because of their melodic urgency, arias such as “Glück, das mir verblieb (Marietta's Lute Song)” and “Mein Sehnen, mein Wähnen (Pierrot's Song)” have found a home among the concert repertoires of many opera singers and radiate far beyond the fame of Die tote Stadt. This production is the first AV release on our newly launched label.

KORNGOLD: DIE TOTE STADT

On its first appearance on the Marco Polo label, this recording was acclaimed as ‘a model of what these things should be’ (Fanfare) and that no release on the label was ‘better or more important than this’ (ClassicsToday.com). It presents a definitive restoration of Korngold’s music for the 1938 Warner Bros.’ production of The Adventures of Robin Hood, starring the ultimate swashbuckler, Errol Flynn, and still one of the most-loved of all motion pictures. Throughout—and to an unprecedented degree—Korngold captures its lavish spectacle, romance, colour, pageantry and humour in his magnificent score. Also included is the Original Theatre Trailer Music, not previously available on CD.

Korngold’s breathtaking precocity is everywhere in evidence in these two chamber masterpieces. The Piano Trio was composed when he was just twelve years old but its symphonic breadth and brilliantly demanding piano writing reveal myriad tonal colors and a mischievous reinvention of conventional Viennese form. Audacious yet rooted in lyricism, the String Sextet was written almost five years later and possesses memorable themes as well as a refined, theatrical intimacy.

Spectrum Concerts Berlin is one of Germany’s most significant voices in the world of chamber music and has specialized for Naxos in the music of expatriate German/Austrian composers. Their recording of Schulhoff’s String Sextet (8.573525) was a MusicWeb International ‘Recording of the Month’ in December2016: ‘This is sometimes quite difficult music... [But] it is given a terrific performance here by a group of string players’.

Erich Wolfgang Korngold (1897-1957) was a genius. Naturally he was most widely known and rewarded as one of the founding composers of Hollywood film music, but he is not a particularly well-known composer in the classical music world. His three string quartets are surely masterpieces and can be seen as modern tone poems imbued with beautiful melancholy and Viennese charm. A child prodigy, Korngold wrote some of the most heart-wrenching melodies, which are sure to leave any listener longing for more. His String Quartet No. 2, Op. 26 (1933) was written just before Korngold moved to Hollywood and is full of musical imagery of Vienna, with gestures towards the waltzes of Johan Strauss II as well as the intricate lyricism of Richard Strauss. A fierce anti-serialist, Korngold was determined that it was still possible to stretch the boundaries of tonality without adapting to the 12-tone technique. The String Quartet No. 3, Op. 34 (1945) is full of themes that he used in his film scores and was written when Korngold was suffering from deep depression. The quartet is much darker. Why did we choose to tackle Korngold’s music for this unique project of a direct-to-disc recording on vinyl? The music resonates deeply with us, as it represents the epitome of late romanticism and lyrical expression. We all have a profound love for romantic music and after listening to some recordings of his quartets we knew instantly these were the perfect fit for us. It was definitely a challenge to understand the idiom in Korngold’s writing. Our individual personalities as well as the Alma sound is clearly audible.

SOMM Recordings throws new, invigorating light on the Chamber Music of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, performed by the Eusebius Quartet and pianist Alasdair Beatson. Hailed by musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky as “the very last breath of the romantic spirit of Vienna”, Korngold’s stellar beginnings in Europe’s concert halls and opera houses were later overshadowed by his success in America where his soaring symphonic signature forged the template for the Hollywood soundtrack. But, as Korngold authority Brendan G Carroll notes in his informative booklet essay, the composer’s “relatively small body of chamber works... is no less impressive and actually offers a succinct distillation of his style and voice, often to considerably profound effect.”

The earliest work here is the string quartet arrangement of the suite drawn from his 1920 incidental music to Shakespeare’s Viel Lärmen um Nichts (Much Ado About Nothing). Its glowing Intermezzo is heard in the world premiere recording of Tom Poster’s sumptuous new arrangement. The following year’s Op.15 Piano Quintet was composed shortly after Korngold’s opera Die tote Stadt (The Dead City), and, Carroll notes, “its flamboyant, heroic melodic style owes much to the residual influence of that epic score”. The Op.26 Second String Quartet from 1933 “is one of the most intensely ‘Viennese’ works Korngold ever wrote.” The jolly, bubbling humor of its opening gives way to a rich, expansive Larghetto before concluding with a spirited hymn to that most Viennese of dance forms, the waltz.

Praised as “excellent” by The Sunday Times, the Eusebius Quartet was formed in 2016 and is making its debut on SOMM Recordings. Alasdair Beatson’s previous SOMM releases include his enthusiastically reviewed recording debut, coupling Schumann, Grieg, Brahms and Berg (SOMMCD 086), and a Mendelssohn recital (SOMMCD 104) hailed by Classic FM for its “highly sensitive playing of rare insight”.

Korngold was just 23 when his most celebrated stage work was premiered in 1920 by no less than Otto Klemperer. The rich orchestration and brilliant bel canto vocal writing is here superbly realized by a cast led by Klaus Florian Vogt and Camilla Nylund, with “conducting to die for” (The Guardian) from Mikko Franck. “I regard Die tote Stadt as one of the greatest operas of the first quarter of the 20th century and the Finnish National Opera’s production makes it stand out as a true masterpiece, scenically and musically.” -Seen and Heard International

Korngold’s greatest critical successes lay in the field of opera and in his film scores. The early sets of incidental music reflect these two elements, sharing the theatrical bravura of opera and anticipating his own later filmic techniques. The music for the Viennese production of Shakespeare’s much Ado About Nothing in 1920, heard here in full, is expressive and dramatic. Der Vampir, a psychological study of desire, seduction and greed, is rarely heard, but remains a potent example of Korngold’s instinct for directness of characterization.

“[It's] a pleasant surprise to be confronted with something completely unfamiliar…The Holst Sinfonietta performs these waltzes, flourishes and scarps of underscoring with considerable color and Schwung." -Gramophone

REVIEW:

This disc reaffirms – as if such proof were still necessary – just what a prodigious genius the young Erich Wolfgang Korngold was. The complete incidental music for Korngold’s score to Much Ado About Nothing runs to nearly fifty minutes of music brimming over with pointed musical characterisation, subtle scene-setting and gorgeous melody – all written before his twenty first birthday.

The playing of his Holst-Sinfonietta is uniformly excellent and the engineering manages to find a really effective balance between all the disparate instruments. Time and again I marvelled at the genius of Korngold’s lushly economical scoring.

A further attraction of this new disc for the Korngold completeist collector is the presence of the world premiere recording of his score to accompany Der Vampir oder Die Gejagten The Vampire or The Hunted). Written just three years later this is a fascinating score in the almost expressionist way the music instantly illuminates and comments on the drama.

The issue for the listener – especially the non-German speaking ones – is that the bulk of the music is underscoring dialogue. In this instance Cornelius Bauer (who also contributes the useful liner note) and conductor Klaus Simon have produced a concert version where a narrator explains the plot as well as performing a number of roles. Here Ekkehard Abele is the suitably dramatic narrator/voice. However, due to copyright issues the liner cannot reproduce any of the texts for the work. This is compounded by the fact that the liner briefly outlines the convoluted plot but gives no actual synopsis and no indication of which track/cue fits what part of the plot. Furthermore, it would appear that some of Korngold’s music has been lost. The score as it currently exists ends with an extended dream sequence but there are two more acts in the original play which include indications of further music cues. So what we have here is an attenuated arrangement of an incomplete score in an [potentially] unfamiliar language.

None of which sounds too enticing but this is where Korngold’s especial genius shines through. The instrumentation of Der Vampir is even smaller than Much Ado. Here he uses just flute, violin, cello, harp, piano and percussion as well as a Greek-style spoken chorus for the aforementioned dream-sequence. None of the music cues are anything like as extensive or self-contained either but goodness me they are effective. The playing here is every bit as skilled and apt as in the main work but this will remain very much an appendix to the main body of Korngold’s work.

The main value of this disc is the complete recording of Much Ado About Nothing which is immensely enjoyable. Der Vampir is valuable as a first recording and in the way it illustrates the range of Korngold’s skill especially at such a young age. The only real mystery is why such a valuable recording has sat in the Naxos vaults for nearly eight years.

-- MusicWeb International (Nick Bernard)