Othmar Schoeck: Notturno

Album review

Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck has received a bad and undeserved reputation on many fronts he didn't deserve. As his output is heavily invested in ambitious German-language song settings and cycles of various kinds -- what Dr. Seuss may have had in mind when he poked fun at a "long, long song" in his book Hop on Pop -- a great deal of it doesn't travel well. Conventional wisdom also dictated that Schoeck was a conservative post-romantic composer whose language never entered the modern era even though he lived until 1957. Once faced with Schoeck's actual music, though, you realize this depends on what you think is "modern," and to that end musicians have come a long way since the days of the 1970s when adherence to the ideals of the Second Vienna School was considered a requirement. A lot of what we love best about their music is what is found in the profound seriousness and mystery of Arnold Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, Alban Berg's Wozzeck and Lyric Suite, and Webern's early songs and his Five Movements for String Quartet, Op. 5. Although he does not employ structural systems that are least discernable and stylistically and Schoeck is clearly a different voice from the foregoing, his Notturno (1933) belongs to that world. It is highly chromatic, intense, and charged with the same expressionist idiom and sense of the enigmatic that we know from the Schoenberg school. It has been only recorded twice before, and arguably never better than on this ECM New Series disc featuring baritone Christian Gerhaher and the Rosamunde Quartett. Christian Gerhaher sings this long and difficult work exactly the way it should go; he never barks it out or makes recourse to the heavy vibrato germane to Wagnerian opera, but makes sparing use of vibrato to bring out the best mood of the text. The quartet, too, handles the slippery and complex chromatics of Schoeck's music with authority and tenderness; it has clearly studied every twist and turn in this score and seamlessly negotiates it all.
This particular project is a labor of love of Heinz Holliger, who admits in his brief booklet note that at one time he, too, felt that Schoeck was a relic of the past. Nothing replaces the act of discovery, and Schoeck is a major one; if you love the expressionist sound of the early twentieth century, then you won't want to miss this. As Holliger stated, "May this be the moment of Schoeck's rediscovery"; indeed, this disc makes it seem like it's his turn and a lot worse could happen to music than for Schoeck to finally step out of the shadows. It's a little short at 48 minutes, but the Notturno is such a complete musical experience in itself that you won't go away feeling like you need more.

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