Concert photo to follow
Monday, July 22, 2024
Royal Albert Hall, London
January 25, 1905, Vienna – a concert in the Musikverein pairs the premieres of Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande (based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s in-French play) and Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau (inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Little Mermaid) conducted by the respective composers, a family affair given Schoenberg had married Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde in 1901.
Schoenberg’s Pelleas has a distinguished discography, including Barbirolli and Karajan, and, more recently, Edward Gardner, Paavo Järvi and Jonathan Nott. This well-prepared Proms performance found Ryan Bancroft making the most of the music’s shadows and its volatility, finding expressive leeway, clarity of detail, especially among the darker woodwinds, and fortissimos were unstinting if a little uniform; additionally, there was the occasional sag during this forty-minute account, with an appropriate distinct chill in the air in the later stages.
The Zemlinsky, played using Antony Beaumont’s Critical Edition, which restores material cut by the composer either side of the premiere is lighter and brighter than the Schoenberg, less claustrophobic, if just as depictive and tragic by the close, and whereas Schoenberg designated Pelleas as a symphonic poem, Zemlinsky termed his Mermaid a fantasy. Bancroft and BBCNOW took to it like a sea-creature to water relishing the painterly invention, vivid scoring, scenery, and depth of feeling. At forty-three minutes, maybe a little more expanse would have yielded even more by way of narrative.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00214gk
A friend writes: “I was following Beaumont’s score (Universal Edition, 2013) and had assumed we’d hear the extra 88 bars from the second movement, but we got what’s called the ‘Revised’ Edition of the second movement, which was the one premiered in 1905, but not the longer ‘original’ music with the ‘bei der Meerhexe’ section.”
That probably explains Bancroft’s 43 minutes and, above, Marc Albrecht’s 48.