Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande; Verklärte Nacht album review – brightness without transfiguration

The record companies haven’t exactly been falling over themselves to mark this year’s 150th anniversary of the birth of Arnold Schoenberg ; this is one of only a handful of new releases devoted to his music, and it pairs the two scores that, with his orchestration of Brahms’s G minor Piano Quartet, are the most likely to be encountered in the concert hall nowadays. In Rafael Payare’s performance the connections between Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande and the symphonic poems of Richard Strauss are more obvious than usual: the bright, transparent sound of the Montreal Symphony and Payare’s fondness for brisk no-nonsense tempi make what in some performances can seem quite a dogged, almost didactic work into something illustrative and programmatic.

The performance of Verklärte Nacht is equally careful and businesslike, but perhaps not quite as successful. While the version of the score for string orchestra that Payare conducts never seems as convincing as the string-sextet original, it can at least make a virtue of the extra tonal resources of the full string section, but some of this seems underpowered; the great D major theme that is the work’s climactic moment does not “transfigure” in the way the work really demands, for all the care with which the textures are balanced and sifted. As a showcase for the capabilities of the fine Montreal orchestra, which tours Europe next month, it’s very effective, but there are other recordings of both these works that in the end are more convincing.

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