Transfigured

Album review

It is becoming increasingly clear that great benefits accrue when works of the Second Viennese School milieu are performed along with those of Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg. The music of these composers did not represent stepping-stones on the road to atonality but rather responded to a rich constellation of cultural forces. Consider this release by the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, with rising soprano Francesca Chiejina (whose voice may be sufficient reason to seek out the album all by itself, and excitement over it likely put the album on classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2023). Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, in its original string sextet version, concludes the program, and leading up to it are entirely relevant works. Consider the little-known Maiblumen blühten überall ("May Flowers Bloomed Everywhere") by Alexander Zemlinsky, which was not only written for the same sextet medium as Schoenberg's work, plus a soprano but also features a text by Richard Dehmel, another of whose poems furnished the program for Schoenberg's work. The latter all of a sudden seems more enthusiastic, less murky. In between are a piano quintet movement by Webern and four songs by Alma Mahler, here arranged for the sextet medium by Tom Poster. One can question this; the recital-like program would not have been disturbed by playing these songs in their original form, but as with everything else by Alma Mahler that has been turning up lately, they are wonderful, with much of the same way of treating vernacular material that would be heard in the music of her husband. Chandos' sound is generally good, even if it puts Chiejina a bit too far back in the mix. A fine recording of music from Vienna that dispenses with the myth-making and offers a better-rounded examination of the tradition.
© James Manheim /TiVo