In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a multi-faceted musical scene in culturally flourishing Czechoslovakia. When we take a look at the works by Pavel...

In the 1920s and 1930s, there was a multi-faceted musical scene in culturally flourishing Czechoslovakia. When we take a look at the works by Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, Hans Krása, Viktor Ullmann or Erwin Schulhoff, we can perceive a stylistically very similar course, conceivable against the given background as a ‘Prague School’ (as a counter-movement to the ‘Viennese School’). In Schulhoff’s early works, the features are a late Romantic approach influenced by Reger that later developed with an emphasis on rhythm in the direction of Expressionism and Neo-Classicism, also including jazz elements. The starting point is the ‘Don Juan’ story, but the underlying idea in Beneš’ and Schulhoff’s work is not to present the colourful seducer, but the fate of a man driven by his desires and needs who cannot even remotely find happiness and peace in constancy. In his opera, Schulhoff brilliantly manages to find a different dramaturgical approach, on the one hand, and at the same time to pay a kind of alienated homage to Mozart’s work, on the other.

REVIEW:

This 2006 performance was recorded in the Theater an der Wien over several days. Raymond Very assumes the role of Don Juan with great resourcefulness, given some of the difficult registers asked of him, and Iris Vermillion’s La Morte is a perfect foil. Stephanie Friede is Margarethe and takes other smaller roles, whilst the Commendatore is Salvador Fernández-Castro. All the smaller roles are well taken. The ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra evokes both the impressionist-expressionist elements, as well as its more knockabout demotic, with great fervour and clarity and Bertrand de Billy lives up to his reputation as a most astute and perceptive conductor of difficult works such as this—difficult structurally, musically, and in terms of the right kind of ‘tone’.

-- MusicWeb International