5.0 out of 5 stars
Dvorak's Doppelganger, September 22, 2011
This review is from: Dvorák: Serenade for Winds, Op. 44; String Quartet No. 13 (Audio CD)
The annual Spannungen concerts at Heimbach in the last five years have resulted in a number of stunning chamber music recitals, shedding light and other wave lengths above and below the visible spectrum on, for example, Mendelssohn's and Enescu's Octets, and Schubert's trios and Octet. I cannot imagine more impassioned music making than what we have on this disc. Moreover, the passion is not achieved at the expense of the integrity of the score. While the interpretive and rhetorical choices are not the norm, the risk-taking seems justified, and I get no sense of distortion in the interest of mere novelty or effect.
The Serenade is typically presented as sunny, pastoral background music for an outdoor event, with arresting melodies to catch our fitful attention now and then. Not so here. Dvorak largely exists in the mind of the concert-going public as one of the most extroverted of musical personalities, not unlike Mozart. Indeed, as we already have with Mozart, we now learn about another persona of the artist, one who faces the abyss and grapples with overwhelming dark forces. These bucolic woods get downright sinister as we enter ever more deeply. The string quartet, rendered with extraordinary intensity, also comes across as a harrowing idyll. These performances help us make sense of the tone poems of late Dvorak, with their unsettling themes of horror and perversion in a rural, fairy tale setting. Here is a peek into a haunted, primeval world, concurrently touched on in Mahler's songs and symphonies, and soon to be more fully revealed in the operas of Janacek, and parables of Kafka. But it is already there in Dvorak, and we are a long way from Brahms in these works.
Execution is virtuosic and thrilling. Audio reproduction reveals with immediacy the rich timbres of each instrument and a splendid acoustic. Don't miss it!
If exiled to that desert island, I would reach first in my collection for the Beethoven Piano Sonatas (Kempff or Brautigam) and Quartets (Lindsays or Tokyo), Mozart's Wind Serenades and String Quintets (various), the Sibelius Symphonies, the Rachmaninov Preludes (Richter or Steven Osborne), and this disc and the Mendelssohn/Enescu Octets from the Spannungen Festival.
Help other customers find the most helpful reviews
Was this review helpful to you? Yes
No
