Alban Berg LULU

Alban Berg's widow had long resisted anyone completing the last act of what some would consider Berg's masterpiece. For almost 40 years the last act was often performed as a mime to the symphonic fragments composed by Berg before completing the drama for playing abroad, publicising the work. This was because Berg's music at the time was banned by the Nazis in his native Germany.
Without going into extensive detail, this completion by the Austrian conductor and composer, Friedrich Cerha, was a cloak and dagger affair, done between Berg's music publisher and Friedrich Cerha. Berg's widow had written the ban into her will in 1969, and when she died in 1976, this was continued by the Berg foundation which she had set up in 1969. When the completion finally surfaced in 1976, the foundation came to a settlement and thus the completion was allowed to be performed.
The world premiere was entrusted to Pierre Boulez and this recording was made a few months after the triumphant first performances in Paris. Like many premieres which are recorded, there is often a buzz about them, and the present issue is no exception. The cast is a very strong one and the set has been well thought of since its initial release at full price.
Some of DGG Originals releases of opera sets have been criticised for less than complete notes but there are no complaints here. The timing of the work is just a few minutes over what would have been able to be accommodated on a two disc set. DGG have therefore arranged it in the format of one act to a disc, so there are no awkward side breaks. Added to this is a full multi-lingual libretto with copious notes; in fact it looks like a straight reissue of the full price version apart from the LP look of the discs.
The third act completes Alban Berg's inspiration and brings the story of Lulu to its proper conclusion instead of the previous ending which left the drama hanging in mid-air. There, we missed Lulu being murdered by Jack the Ripper and Berg's transformation of the heroine from loose woman to blackmail victim. Also her husband earlier in the drama (Dr. Schon) becomes her murderer (Jack the Ripper). Berg's ingenuity of casting the same singer in the two parts, brings a totally different aspect to the drama. In the completed version, Lulu ends up as a truly tragic heroine.
Teresa Stratos fully measures up to this portrayal and is ably supported by the remainder of the cast, Boulez and his orchestra. Her voice is bright and strong and she portrays the character of Lulu very accurately. This is backed up by a very clear, analytical recording, without the dryness of some of the competitive versions. This stands at the head of available versions of Lulu, and it is wonderful to welcome it back into the catalogue. (John Phillips)

Alban Berg (1885 - 1935)
Lulu
Prolog
1. Hereinspaziert in die Menagerie [4:32]
Act 1
2. "Darf ich eintreten?" - "Mein Sohn!" ... "Wie ist dir?" [5:09]
3. "Machen Sie auf!" ... [Interlude] "Wollen Sie mir zuhaken" [9:06]
4. "Eva!" - "Befehlen?" - "Ich finde, du siehst heute reizend aus" [3:35]
5. "Den hab' ich mir auch ganz anders vorgestellt" [4:27]
6. "Was tut denn Ihr Vater da?" Sonate "Wenn ich ihr Mann wäre" [7:03]
7. Monoritmica "Nun?" / "Du hast eine halbe Million geheiratet" [5:03]
8. "Ich darf mich jetzt hier nicht sehen lassen" [3:54]
9. Verwandlungsmusik [3:07]
10. "Seit ich für die Bühne arbeite" - "Noch etwas, bitte" [3:53]
11. "Über die liesse sich freilich .." ... " Das hättest du dir besser erspart" [4:29]
12. "Wie kannst du die Szene gegen .." ... "Sehr geehrtes Fräulein .." [7:13]


Act 2
1. "Sie glauben nicht" - "Könntest du dich für heute nachmittag" [5:29]
2. "Gott sei dank, dass wir endlich" ... "Hast oben abgeschlossen?" [5:40]
3. "Die Matinée wird, wie ich mir denke" [6:15]
4. "Sein Vater!" ... "Du Kreatur, die mich durch den Strassenkot" [3:46]
5. "Wenn sich die Menschen" ... "Du kannst mich nicht dem Gericht" [6:13]
6. Filmmusik [2:49]
7. "Er lässt auf sich warten" [5:42]
8. "Sie wollten der verrückten Rakete" - "Mit wem habe ich ... Sie?" [5:34]
9. "Hü, kleine Lulu" - "O Freiheit! Herr Gott im Himmel!" [7:26]
10. "Wenn deine beiden grossen Kinderaugen" - "Durch dieses Kleid" [4:58]

Act 3
1. "Meine Herrn und Damen!" ... "Der Staatsanwalt bezahlt demjenigen" [9:22]
2. "Brilliant! Es geht brilliant" [2:06]
3. "Einen Moment! Hast du meinen Brief gelesen?" [3:12]
4. "Ich brauche nämlich notwendig Geld" [3:33]
5. "Behandeln sie mich doch wenigstens anständig" [2:41]
6. "Martha! Mein liebes Herz, du kannst mich heute vor " [2:31]
7. "Wollen sie wohl diese Aktie akzeptieren" [2:45]
8. Verwandlungsmusik / Interlude [2:52]
9. "Der Regen trommelt zur Parade" [4:39]
10. "Wenn ich dir ungelegen komme" - "Ihr Körper stand auf dem Höhepunkt" [6:08]
11. "Komm nur herein, mein Schatz" [4:16]
12. "Der Herr Doktor haben sich schon zur Ruhe begeben" [2:42]
13. "Wer ist das?" [5:17]
14. "Das ist der letzte Abend" - "Lulu! Mein Engel!" [3:56]

Teresa Stratas (sop/ Lulu)
Franz Mazura (bar/ Dr Schön/ Jack)
Yvonne Minton (mez/ Countess Geschwitz)
Kenneth Riegel (ten/ Alwa)
Gerd Nienstedt (bass/ An Animal-tamer/ Rodrigo)
Toni Blankenheim (bar/ Schigolch/ Professor of Medicine / The Police Officer)
Robert Tear (ten/ The Painter/ A Negro)
Helmut Pampuch (ten/ The Prince/ The Manservant / The Marquis)
Jules Bastin (bass/ The Theatre Manager/ The Banker)
Ursula Boese (mez/ Her Mother)
Claude Meloni (bar/ A Journalist)
Pierre-Yves Le Maigat (bass/ A Manservant)
Hanna Schwarz (mez/ A Dresser in the theatre, High School Boy / A Groom)
Jane Manning (sop/ A fifteen-year-old girl)
Anna Ringart (mez/ A Lady Artist)
Paris Opéra Orchestra
Pierre Boulez.

2000 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg

3 Compact Discs ADD

463 6172 6 GOR 3

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Magdalena Kožená BACH Arias (reuploaded)

Here is a richly gifted, highly accomplished young singer – Mozart prize-winner Salzburg 1995, ‘Talent of the Year’ Prague Award-winner 1996, Vienna Volksoper Clemenza di Tito (Annio) 1997, together with a burgeoning career in concert and oratorio. She sings her Bach without a great deal of expression, in the Lieder or opera singer’s sense, but with due care for phrasing and rhythm, which are more important. Her voice is a fine and beautiful instrument, firmly produced, warm in timbre with a glow on the upper middle notes, sure of pitch. The present deficiency appears to be in true legato: ‘appears’ because she may be keeping a better legato in reserve for 19th-century music, having been taught that what she gives us here is as much legato as is good for Bach. Understand that there is nothing gross – no aspirates or bumps or tintack hammering. But the notes are too separate and unbound even so. The opening of ‘Wie starb die Heldin’ illustrates the point; but it is habitual and deprives the music of one of the special pleasures the singing voice should supply. What she does ‘sounds all right’ (people will say); but listen to Ferrier or Baker, for example, and you hear much more of the true legato which you may think to have heard here.
It is a highly enjoyable recital even so. A notable contribution to its success lies in the stylish playing of Musica Florea, a chamber orchestra using period instruments and led by a conductor whose feeling for Bach’s textures and rhythmic life is manifest throughout. Among the cantata arias are some that for many listeners will bring surprise as well as delight: ‘Kommt, ihr angefochtnen Sunder’ is an invitation to all erring mortals to dance their way to Paradise, and, once there, ‘Wohl euch, ihr auserwahlten Seelen’ serenely strikes up a dance for the blessed spirits. Magdalena Kozena herself will doubtless be among them. The leaflet’s introductory note ends auspiciously: ‘A Bach performer steps forward, bringing this glorious music closer to us; in return, we wish a young singer a rich and rewarding life of song.’ Amen to that.' (John Steane)

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750)
Magnificat in D Major, BWV 243
1) Aria: "Et exsultavit spiritus meus" [2:28]
Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd, Cantata BWV 208
2) Aria: Schafe können sicher weiden [4:07]
Ich bin vergnügt mit meinem Glücke Cantata, BWV 84
3) 3. Aria: Ich esse mit Freuden mein weniges Brot [5:13]
St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244
4) No.39 Aria (Alto): "Erbarme dich" [7:34]
Cantata, BWV 198 "Laß Fürstin, laß noch einen Strahl"
5) 5. Aria: "Wie starb die Heldin so vergnügt" [7:00]
6) 3. Verstummt, ihr holden Saiten [3:39]
Cantata No.34 "O ewiges Feuer, O Ursprung der Liebe", BWV34
7) 3. Aria: "Wohl euch, ihr auserwählten Seelen" [5:08]
Cantata: "Wer mich liebet, der wird mein Wort halten" BWV 74
8) 2. Aria: Komm, mein Herze steht dir offen [2:54]
St. John Passion, BWV 245
9) No.35 Aria (soprano): " Zerfließe, mein Herz " [6:43]
Cantata No.30 "Freue dich, erlöste Schar", BWV 30
10) 5. Aria: Kommt, ihr angefocht'nen Sünder [5:22]
Mass in B minor, BWV 232
Kyrie: No.1 Kyrie eleison
Gloria
11) Laudamus te [4:22]

Magdalena Kozená
Musica Florea
Marek Strync


1997 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg
1 CD DDD
457 3672 AH
ARCHIV Produktion

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STOCKHAUSEN Gruppen / KURTÁG Grabstein für Stephan - Stele

Experiencing Stockhausen's Gruppen in the concert-hall — or on television, as in Channel 4's film of the 1996 CBSO performance — tends to underline the spatial separation of the three orchestral groups. On disc, even with resplendently spacious DG sound, it is the interdependence of those separate instrumental bodies that is most vividly apparent. What we hear is less a matter of three distinct and variously superimposed musical strata as a three-way discourse around shared material, an exhilarating voyage of discovery, during which separation comes to count for less than the common purpose of exploring the same essential premises from different angles.
The greatest virtue of this performance is that it manages to preserve the music's sense of exploratory excitement alongside a proper concern for precision and textural clarity. No mere technical exercise, Gruppen is a marvellous display piece, and it is the Berlin brass and percussion who have the lion's share of the limelight, rising to the occasion under the well-prepared guidance of Abbado and his two colleagues.
A fine performance of such an important, seriously neglected modern score is reason enough to rejoice, but this disc has another pair of aces up its sleeve, with the first recordings of two works by György Kurtág. Both are musical memorials, but they are very different in character. Grabstein für Stephan is like a ghostly echo of a Mahler funeral march, often barely audible, with a pair of shattering outbursts at its centre to intensify the prevailing aura of despair and regret.
Stele is more monumental. From its opening, distinctly Beethovenian sonority, it proceeds with a grandeur and determination that transcends grief and reasserts enduring human values. Stele may not have a happy ending, but its strength of character and power of expression enable it to function as a celebration of humanity as well as a profound meditation on mortality. (AW, Gramophone, March 1997)

György Kurtág (1926 - )
Grabstein für Stephan op.15/c
1) Fassung für grosses Orchester und Solo-Gitarre [9:19]
Jurgen Ruck
Berliner Philharmoniker
Claudio Abbado
Karlheinz Stockhausen (1928 - 2007)
2) Gruppen für drei Orchester - Werk Nr.6 [22:34]
Berliner Philharmoniker
Friedrich Goldmann
Claudio Abbado
Marcus Creed
György Kurtág (1926 - )
Stele op.33
3) 1. Adagio [2:45]
4) 2. Lamentoso - disperato, con moto [4:07]
5) 3. Molto sostenuto [5:55]
Berliner Philharmoniker
Claudio Abbado

1996 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg
1 CD DDD
477 7612 6 GH

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Dawn Upshaw GOLIJOV Ayre / BERIO Folk Songs

Osvaldo Golijov has long felt a kinship with Berio's music, and he's created a song cycle, Ayre, to demonstrate Dawn Upshaw's vocal range, just as Berio did with Cathy Berberian's in his Folk Songs. Golijov says he “saw a rainbow" when he first realized the range of colour in Upshaw's voice. Upshaw says: “Ayre takes me vocally to places where I have never been before: in aesthetic terms, it's opened new doors." The cycle is scored for an ensemble similar to Berio's, but also including the accordion and ronroco (an Argentinian variant of the charango, a small South American fretted lute) and also the laptop, which Golijov regards as a 21st-century folk instrument. The klezmer-tinged clarinet solos were inspired by David Krakauer, the world's most celebrated klezmer innovator; two of the songs were written by Gustavo Santaolalla; Wa Habibi comes from the Arab superstar Fairouz; Miles Davis's Sketches of Spain is the inspiration for the final song. Golijov's texts are in Arabic, Hebrew, Sardinian, Spanish and Ladino (the lost language of Spanish Jews); his melodies are a meld of three cultures - Christian, Islamic and Jewish - which coexisted peaceably in the Iberian peninsula until the late 15th century.
Luciano Berio's Folk Songs for voice and seven instruments, composed 40 years ago for his wife Cathy Berberian, blazed the trail for composers wanting to blur the distinction between “folk" and “art" music. Not all of these eleven pieces are folk songs in the strict sense of the word: two are by the American composer John Jacob Niles and two are by Berio himself. But the others come from Armenia, France, Sicily and Sardinia, with one being an Azerbaijani love song recorded on an old 78 by a singer with a town band and aurally transcribed by Berio and Berberian themselves. Berio's scoring evokes a world beyond the concert hall: he uses the viola and cello to suggest the outdoor clarinet and folk fiddle, and he beefs up the flute and harp with tambourines and side drums.
For Osvaldo Golijov the music of Luciano Berio occupies a special place: “I always connected with it - he spoke to me with a directness, as Piazzolla had done when I was a child."

Osvaldo Golijov (1960 - )
Ayre
1. 1. Mananita de San Juan (Morning of St. John's Day) [3:56]
2. 2. Una Madre Comió Asado (A Mother Roasted her Child) [3:01]
3. 3. Tancas Serradas a Muru (Walls are Encircling the Land) [2:57]
4. 4. Luna [2:04]
5. 5. Nanni [3:15]
6. 6. Wa Habibi (My Love) [6:15]
7. 7. Aiini Taqttiru (My Eyes Weep) [2:47]
8. 8. Kun Li-Guitari Wataran Ayyuha Al-Maa' (Be a String, Water, to my Guitar) [1:14]
9. 9. Sueltate las Cintas (Untie your Ribbons) [1:40]
10. 10. Yah, Anna Emtzacha (Oh, Where Shall I find You?) [3:44]
11. 11. Ariadna en su Laberinto (Ariadne in Her Labyrinth) [9:15]
Dawn Upshaw

The Andalucian Dogs

Luciano Berio (1925 - 2003)
Folk Songs
12. 1. Black is the colour (USA) [2:44]
13. 2. I wonder as I wander (USA) [2:06]
14. 3. Loosin yelav (Armenia) [2:35]
15. 4. Rosssignolet du bois (France) [1:28]
16. 5. A la femminisca (Sicily) [1:32]
17. 6. La donna ideale (Italy) [1:18]
18. 7. Ballo (Italy) [1:34]
19. 8. Motettu de Tristura (Sardinia) [1:53]
20. 9. Malorous qu'o uno fenno (Auvergne - France) [1:01]
21. 10. Lo fiolaire (Auvergne - France) [2:57]
22. 11. Azerbaijan love song (Azerbaijan) [2:48]
Dawn Upshaw

2006 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg
1 CD DDD
477 5415 5 GH

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Hélène Grimaud RESONANCES

"I was eleven and could play perhaps the first page and a half. I’d no idea what the piece was about, but what I could read and play fascinated me,” Hélène Grimaud describes her early contact with the piece that is central to the present release, a piece she first encountered when she was still practically a child. “Alban Berg’s sonata”, she continues, “was the starting point for a programme that seems to trace an arbitrary line through the history of music.” And yet she identifies subtle links that take her on a geographical journey through the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, although she admits that “Mozart’s Salzburg did not officially belong to Austria, and Bartók would have strongly resisted this act of appropriation. But somehow Mozart’s music anticipates much that later returns in the music of Austro-Hungary, in Liszt and even in Berg, where it comes to full fruition.”
Resonances can be identified. Echoes and pre-echoes, fascinating historical links that come together in Berg’s sonata. The Op. 1 of the Viennese master of atonality is nominally in B minor, but it already explores the very limits of tonality. It serves as the conceptual starting point and effective culmination of the musical journey that Hélène Grimaud under­takes with her listeners. And all roads lead to the harmonic and thematic distillation that Schoenberg’s pupil achieved with this “apprentice piece” of his: Berg’s sonata concentrates in a single movement everything that constitutes a Classical sonata movement and does so, moreover, in the simplest manner imaginable.
But the architectural rigour – an “echo” of the Classical structure that Berg learnt from his teacher – goes hand in hand with a wealth of ideas and an emotional openness that are rarely found in music of the early modern period, a period that reaches its first real high point in this work.
“One assumes that a piece with the opus number one”, says Hélène Grimaud, “must be an early work, but the truth is that Berg’s sonata is the perfect incarnation of what he could bring to the world. It’s an extreme expression of something that seems to come from the soul, involving no calculation and yet resulting in a piece of an unfathomabbly lucid structure.”
It was in 2009 that Hélène Grimaud rediscovered the copy of the score that she had retained from her childhood like some oddly fascinating treasure. Now an internationally acclaimed pianist, she re-read the piece that had once seemed so mysterious and that her teacher Pierre Barbizet had filled with many colourful notes and an affectionate “list of contents” stuck to the front endpapers. It was now revealed with the immediacy of a dramatic scene from a Romantic opera. “It’s a music drama cast in the miniature form of a single-movement sonata,” says the pianist.
This brings us neatly on to the only piano sonata by that sorcerer among Romantic pianists, a work that is likewise in B minor: “Franz Liszt too wrote a single-movement sonata,” says Hélène Grimaud, “albeit on a vast – let’s admit it, ‘Wagnerian’ – scale. From a structural point of view, the movements of a multi-sectional sonata in first-movement sonata form, with exposition, development section, recapitulation and coda, have merged together. Once again we have echoes of something that is familiar, but redefined and reordered and concentrated in one vast formal structure. And once again the question isn’t that of the composer’s mastery in erecting such a complex edifice. The fact that Liszt is in total control of the musical structure says nothing about the equally highly developed mastery of expression. The result is a music drama guided by the possibilities of the piano, a sonata that is as theatrical as a sonata can be, operatic in an instrumental sense. Let’s not forget the musico-historical component: Wagner wouldn’t have written his operas if Liszt hadn’t existed. At least not in the way he wrote them.”
With the Liszt Sonata the pianist becomes a stage director, a role she sees as an artistic challenge. “Historically speaking, this leads us back to Mozart. He too writes operatic scenes for his instrument, giving it recitatives and arias to sing. He extracts everything from the possibilities of the piano. In terms of his period – and this links him to Liszt and Berg – he’s an extremist in matters of expression, a point that made him so interesting to Beethoven: the middle movements of Mozart’s A minor Sonata and Beethoven’s Sonata op. 31 no. 2 (‘The Tempest’) are as related as any brother and sister. Mozart’s sonata teems with things that were to come later; and it speaks a subjective language.”
The music of Béla Bartók strikes us like that of Liszt and Berg, only in a different way, for he tried to define the linguistic element in music even more concretely than his predecessors. Not only within the confines of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but also after its collapse, he set out in search of true folk music, the authentic language of human beings, and made it the source of his inspiration. It appears in works such as the Romanian Folk Dances not as an echo but as something direct and undistorted. At the end of our musical journey to eastern Europe, we find ourselves listening more closely than ever to the most immediate expression of people singing and dancing, at the point where the expression of the subject is again subsumed by the collective understanding. (Hélène Grimaud was talking to Wilhelm Sinkovicz)

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 - 1791)
Piano Sonata No.8 in A minor, K.310
1) 1. Allegro maestoso [7:55]
2) 2. Andante cantabile con espressione [10:22]
3) 3. Presto [2:55]
Alban Berg (1885 - 1935)
Piano Sonata, Op.1
4) Mässig bewegt - Langsames Tempo - Quasi Adagio [11:37]
Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886)
Piano Sonata in B minor, S.178
5) Lento assai - Allegro energico - Grandioso - Recitativo - Andante sostenuto - Quasi Adagio - Allegro energico - Più mosso - Stretta quasi Presto - Presto-Prestissimo - Andante sostenuto - Allegro moderato - Lento assai [30:13]
Béla Bartók (1881 - 1945)
6 Roumanian Folk Dances, BB 68, Sz. 56
6) 1. Stick Dance [1:09]
7) 2. Sash Dance [0:28]
8) 3. Stamping Dance [1:05]
9) 4. Dance of Buchum [1:23]
10) 5. Roumanian Polka [0:29]
11) 6. Fast Dance [0:59]

Hélène Grimaud

2010 Deutsche Grammophon GmbH, Hamburg
1 CD DDD
477 8766 GH

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