Klaus Mertens, Mutare Ensemble, Gerhard Müller-Hornbach - Othmar Schoeck: Elegie (2008) CD-Rip

In the vinyl era, domestic Schoeck boomlets happened at intervals of a decade or more, while CD days have seen a few reissues and fewer notable new recordings. The simultaneous appearance of the Elegie and Notturno (ECM 2061) the ripest of Schoeck’s song cycles with Chris Walton’s eminently Read more Othmar Schoeck: Life and Works (University of Rochester Press, 2009), raises the possibility of the composer becoming a vibrant presence. Good luck. The current production illustrates why viable work too often gets lost in the shuffle.
Elegie sets 24 poems, most by Lenau, the master of shuddering, suicidal Weltschmerz , rounded with a sort of benediction from Eichendorff. But for Lenau’s compulsively neurotic response to lost love, Schoeck’s musical language hardly moves from the orbit of post-Romanticism—surprisingly, given that it was composed over 1921–22—though the ways in which it is used to mark a modern sensibility are many and subtle. For instance, No. 12, “Herbstklage,” to the listener without German, seems another innocuously wistful apostrophe to autumn leaves. But among the lines thus rendered are (in the late David Mason Greene’s translation), “How sadly the wind blew through the bushes, as if weeping; Nature’s death-rattle shudders through the sere grove … Faithfully every year brings withered leaves and withered hopes.” Far from being another Romantic ramble with daisies and dickiebirds, the disparity of matter to manner marks acute irony. NCA’s production includes the poems in German, but no translations a bad miscalculation.
If we had only this account we might consider ourselves fortunate, but Andreas Schmidt’s more keenly attuned performance, with Werner Andreas Albert and the Musikkollegium Winterthur (cpo 999 472-2), is still available and provides the poems with serviceable English translations—if less pungent than Greene’s (made for the Musical Heritage Society’s LP issue of Arthur Loosli’s pioneering 1967 tilt at Elegie with Theo Hug and an unnamed chamber ensemble, MHS 3454/55, Fanfare 8:5, 12:6). Albert lingers, lapping Schoeck’s morbidity in a prolonged caress as Schmidt’s subdued croon seems to shrink from the dark sentiments he’s uttering, throwing into high relief Klaus Mertens’s cut-and-dried delivery, abetted by Gerhard Müller-Hornbach and the Mutare Ensemble’s businesslike getting on with it. In the succinct separation of sheep from goats by Canadian composer, pianist, and critic Gordon Rumson, the Mertens/Müller-Hornbach reading is “professional but not artistic”—a usefully apt distinction one is forced to make distressingly often with the products of the new century. NCA’s surround-sound repletion—as detail leaps into prominence, if not into piquancy—merely affords the listener a close-up of an essentially faceless go at a work well worth knowing. If one is hearing unfamiliar music in a lackluster reading, has one really heard it? Lieder, generally, and Schoeck’s in particular, require a divinatory touch to take wing. Schoeck mavens will want this as a matter of course (collectors are crazy that way), though the novice is urged to grab the cpo disc while it’s still available. – Adrian Corleonis