It contains the work with which Dvorak made his breakthrough into recognition, his Serenade for Wind and Strings of 1878, plus his Violin Concerto and 8th Symphony. The violin soloist is China’s Siqing Lu (呂思清), who engenders such extrovert enthusiasm from audiences whenever he performs in Taiwan. It’s notable that the same freshness that marks the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra also characterizes these mostly very young Taiwanese musicians.
Lastly another pair of CDs that have astonished me this month — Arnold Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, recorded by Abbado and the Vienna Philharmonic, and released by DGM in 1995. If you associate Schoenberg only with the often dissonant and abrasive 12-tone system he took to in his later years, listen to this, a massive piece of late Romanticism that took audiences by storm in the Vienna of 1913.
It’s essentially an oratorio telling the legendary story of the love of King Waldemar IV of Denmark for the young girl Tovelille (“little dove”) who he visits secretly in her castle at Gurre (hence the title “Songs of Gurre”). Tove is killed by Waldemar’s jealous wife, and after his own death Waldemar hunts the landscape with his followers in search of her wandering ghost.
Siegfried Jerusalem sings Waldemar, Sharon Sweet is Tove, and Marjana Lipovsek is the Wood Dove, whose lament for the death of Waldemar ends the first CD. The spoken narrative against an orchestral background, originally intended for a man but here finely delivered by a woman, is by Barbara Sukowa.
Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder had an enormous effect when first unveiled. Audiences cried and ovations seemed unending. With its extensive nature-mysticism and lament for a fallible humanity, it was as if listeners had a premonition of the First World War that was soon to come, and to devastate all their lives.
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