Customer Reviews

Robert Schumann: Das Paradies und die Peri / Requiem für Mignon / Nachtlied - The Monteverdi Choir / Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique / John Eliot Gardiner

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This superb album of three Schumann choral works proves (yet again) that John Eliot Gardiner belongs in the class of major conductors and not just of "period instruments" specialists. And the works themselves richly deserve to be heard, particularly the spectacular "Paradise and the Peri," which is Schumann at his best; despite the somewhat quaint period flavor of the text, the evocative nature of the music makes this an oratorio that deserves more than to be trotted out as a curiosity. Gardiner and his singers and instrumentalists play it for all it's worth, as they do the magnificent "Requiem for Mignon" and the explosive "Nachtlied." An album not to be missed!

In an interview, Gardiner said that he thought that no one understood Schumann. And you know what -- he's right. It's too easy to criticize Gardiner for his hubris, but when the results are this good, who cares? Schumann is NOT the incoherent, rambling, second rate Romantic composer that too many people view him as (Schumann, BTW, absolutely *hated* the term "Romantic"). Such a misguided point of view makes musicians think that it's perfectly fine to tamper with Schumann's scores, modifying dynamics, setting out sluggish tempi that are modified with self-indulgent rubato, and blaming him for poor orchestration without making an effort to bring out the often cleverly beautiful counterpoint and part-writing in proper balance. With great soloists (lead by the incomparable Barbara Bonney as the Peri), a disciplined choir, and a "period" orchestra, Gardiner's recording of Schumann's "Paradis and the Peri" is a triumph in every way. Gardiner finally reveals Schumann as the one of the most important (if not *the* most important) and vital composers of the first generation of European Romanticism (the others include Mendelssohn, Liszt, Berlioz, and Chopin). The use of period instruments and a properly balanced choir (NOT of the overblown Victorian type, thank god!) ensure clarity, so that the various lines come out with great eloquence. And Gardiner's direction is forthright and vigorous, yet eloquent and expressive, not entirely lacking in rubato (which is a hallmark of 19th century performance practice, after all) yet careful to keep the score moving, thus emphasizing the overall strucuture of this glorious and deeply moving work. Gardiner presents Schumann as Master Raro -- Florestan and Eusebius in perfect balance. Also, don't miss Gardiner's recording of Schumann's symphonies! And I do hope Gardiner will go on to record Schumann's Faust Scenes -- one of the composer's greatest yet most neglected works.

This is actually beyond words! What Gardiner is doing with the romantic repertoire should have been done a long time ago! The clarity of the orchestra, the superb soloists and the wonderful choir blended together to create something absolutuely overwhelming! This cd makes you wonder...what have we really been doing all these years...is the 20th century ideals really good when it comes to the music and the way we hear it? Anyway, this is a superb disc with music ignored by the people who had no understanding for Schumann's way of writing when it actually were themselves who didn't understand a thing!

I have just re listened to this marvelously moving collection of Schumann's choral works again after my initial purchase. I am even more moved and in awe at both Gardiner's way with the Romantic era, and Schumann's powerfully wrought music. Lilting, intense, lyrical but always serene and flowing.

If Gardiner's driven and superbly played HIP Schumann Symphonies were not enough to entice, then do try these beautifully proportioned and recorded works. The clarity is amazing. The Nachtlied is spell binding. Barbara Bonney is enthralling in the Peri role. The choral ending and final brass blaze to part one of Paradise and the Peri is spine tingling, no other way to describe my reaction.

I'm a real Schumann convert. Now wouldn't John Eliot like to try Schumann's opera Genoveva? I hope so. This is simply a spectacularly affecting set. Don't hesitate.

I recall a biography of Schumann that I once read in which the author opined that Schumann was a miniaturist foolishly driven to try his hand at bigger works. The author went on to say the composer's tiny piano piece "Elf" (from Bunte Blatter, I believe) is worth more than all his massive choral works together, collecting dust as they are on library shelves. I submit there are two things wrong with this assessment. First, when it was issued, no one had taken Schumann's big choral works down form the shelf and dusted them off for a long time, so it was pretty impossible for music lovers to make a judgment about their contents. Second, the person who took them down off the shelf, when it occurred, was not John Eliot Gardiner. Pretty strong praise, maybe, but though "Das Paradies und die Peri" has been recorded before, more or less successfully (there used to be a semi-decent version by Armin Jordan on Erato), the beauty and sheer genius of Schumann's work was only hinted at in earlier recordings. And it is a thing of beauty, with music that would beguile even Schumann's detractors. Much is made of Schumann's naivete about orchestral color when he wrote his First Symphony in 1841. Well, by the time of "Peri" in 1843, Schumann knew how to write for the orchestra. His writing for winds, harp, high percussion--instrumentation he rarely used for coloristic effect in his works--is beautifully rich.

Part of the success, of course, is original instruments, whose freshening effect in Schumann's music can be likened to the efforts of a restorer working on the oil painting of an old master. However, it must be said that Schumann was in the thrall of Mendelssohn at this point in his career, so a piece like "The Chorus of the Nile Spirits" (No. 11) has all the lightness of a Mendelssohn scherzo; this is an influence Schumann progressively shed in his later choral music. Still, it is not merely original instruments nor Mendelssohnian influence but Gardiner's sure ear for balance that makes this music come up so fresh and radiant.

Add the fact that Gardiner has at his disposal the radiant voice of Barbara Bonney for his Peri, and it would be difficult to imagine finer talents employed on Schumann's behalf. The other soloists are fine as well--Christoph Pregardien being an especially sweet-voiced match for Bonney in the tenor-solo role.

As critics have pointed out, in "Peri" Schumann benefited from his work with the German lied; the vocal writing is always fluent, and Schumann is always sensitive to the text he is setting. High points for me are the gentle finale to Part 2 (No. 17); No. 20, where the rejected Peri vows to keep on keeping on; No. 23, where the Peri wins her wings, so to speak, by capturing the tears of the repentant sinner; and the final magnificent solo and chorus (No. 26), to which I could listen again and again. No. 23 is like one of Schumann's famous ballads, Nos. 17 and 26 like the best of his great love songs. Sure, the libretto is more than a bit corny for modern tastes. Just skim it, and listen to the music.

Actually, Schumann did miscalculate a bit in this work, and that may be why it isn't heard as often as it should be. The first part is clearly the most dramatic, with a thrilling battle scene using "Turkish" percussion and a powerful final chorus with thundering timpani; Schumann would use that trick again at the end of his wonderful Second Symphony. At this point, Schumann wasn't a seasoned enough oratorio composer to pick, or craft, a libretto that would share the dramatic wealth across all parts. But Parts 2 and 3--especially Part 3--have so many individual beauties that we're the losers if we don't overlook Schumann's miscalculation.

As to the other works on the disc, "Requiem fur Mignon," a very unusual setting of a scene from Goethe, is probably Schumann's best-known choral work, though you are unlikely to hear it in as imaginative and subtle a treatment as Gardiner gives it. Until hearing Gardiner, I thought Abbado's recording, also on DG, was as much as I needed to know about this work, but again, original instruments make all the difference. Despite the enthusiasm of Schumann expert John Devario, who wrote the excellent notes, for "Natchlied," I find it is not on the same exalted plain as either Peri or the Requiem, but it is short and relatively sweet and certainly nice to have as an addendum to the other pieces.

All in all, this is one of the most important Schumann recordings in years. And years.

That was the comment on Paradise and the Peri by the Viennese journalist Hanslick, a witty writer but a dull and unperceptive critic. The loquacious Schumann invited it to some extent by assigning himself two musical personalities, Florestan and Eusebius, in his smaller compositions. This time he was venturing on to the big stage. He did not stay there long, but Paradise and the Peri may be his most successful creation for it. The libretto comes from a German translation-cum-adaptation of the Oriental semi-epic Lalla Rookh by Thomas Moore. In this set the German is reverse-engineered into English by Lionel Salter in those places where Moore's original does not fit. Dr Salter also supplies the translation from Goethe in the Requiem for Mignon; and in the Song of the Night Hebbel's poem is translated by Stewart Spencer.

This is marvellous music from start to finish, and presented in fine performances too. The liner note rightly claims that we hear some excellent orchestration in these pieces. It is not quite the equal of Weber or Berlioz or Mendelssohn in that respect but it is free of the timid over-scoring that envelops Schumann's orchestra in fog when he writes for it on its own. What the note-writer might have added is that Schumann's choral writing is completely first class, and that is a far rarer accomplishment. And more important still - Paradise and the Peri is a composition of true and major stature. Whether it counts as an `oratorio' or not I don't know. Either way, Schumann has created something new and individual of his own, and I would call it a far more significant and valuable composition than all the deplorable oratorio-mongering of Mendelssohn, Gounod, Parry, and others too appalling to mention, added up.

A Peri in this theology is the offspring of a fallen angel and a human being. This is seemingly some kind of Islamic doctrine no doubt half-comprehended (at best) by Moore. Such creatures have a chance of re-entering Paradise, something inconceivable for Damian in the Exorcist films, the nearest `Christian' parallel I can bring to mind for the child of any union between humanity and Lucifer's legions. This particular Peri succeeds at the third attempt to cross the `bar' of Paradise by finding an earthly offering sufficiently acceptable to `Alla'. It was impossible with the Olympics just behind me not to be reminded irreverently of the pole-vault and its `bar', but the three tales of virtue embattled are touching and beautiful even in Moore's sentimental verse and commonplace diction. The music is continuous in form and entirely lyric in style. It consists of separate `numbers', like the oratorios of Handel or Haydn to that extent or even Verdi's Otello, but linked without interruption as in Otello. There are numerous narrative sections, only one of them called a `recitative', and these display a new and melodious idiom, perhaps suggested by Schubert's Lazarus, if Schumann knew that.

The performance and recording deserve unstinting praise. The Peri herself is sung by the great Barbara Bonney, but the other roles, titled or not, are treated generously by Schumann and handled eloquently by their respective artists, some of whose names are becoming familiar to me from the wonderful `pilgrimage' through the Bach cantatas that Gardiner must have already had in mind while his immediate focus was on Schumann. Both here and in the two smaller works that accompany it in this set the choral writing is superb and delivered with obvious relish by the choristers. Whether Schumann's orchestral writing is really as superior to repute as it is made to seem here I do not choose to speculate, but here it certainly sounds very different from the second symphony or the Manfred overture, fine works though both are.

The Requiem for Mignon captures the numinous atmosphere of Goethe with outstanding success - credit in the first instance to the composer and in the second to the director and performers. This a rare enactment of tenderness and sympathy that pass beyond the purely human level, and it says much for what Schumann's genius really amounted to that he could handle such a theme not just so impressively but also seemingly from a deep instinct for this strange and elusive tone. Without making invidious distinctions among the performers it is surely right and proper to highlight the boy soloists, the embodiment of an innocence that tragedy is unable to touch. The short Nachtlied is another surpassingly beautiful piece, given as much loving attention as its larger companions here, and indeed receiving its first recording.

The liner note seems very good to me. It is right and necessary where Schumann is concerned to read parables about The Artist (early 19th century model) into such a tale of redemption through struggle and purity as we find in Paradise and the Peri. I have one slight but niggling criticism to make of the production overall, and it relates to Dr Salter's `filler' contributions to the English text here. Very properly he elects to write in rhyming verse as Moore himself does; but could he not have taken some more trouble over his scansion? `Love of country shining in his eyes' is no metre at all, for instance, in its context here. `Approached the pearly gates of Eden' seems to be intended to rhyme with `With timid steps the Peri then'; and other prosodic monstrosities are altogether too frequent. I and generations of musicians have good cause to appreciate Salter's great contribution to our musical culture and comprehension, but if he is to clear this particular bar into Paradise he needs to take another run at it.

How have compositions of this stature been so obscure for so long? Do you expect to enter Paradise if you stay unfamiliar with them?

What a fascinating discovery this is for anyone who still thinks of Schumann as either a composer of "mere" miniatures or a rather frowsy second-rank Romantic. While I would hesitate to call it a masterpiece - it's a little too imbalanced (lacking in dramatic tension in parts 2 and 3) and hampered by a twee libretto - it is nonetheless full of innovative orchestration, meltingly beautiful melody and genuinely moving moments. It is the work which propelled Schumann to fame in 1843 and its neglect is probably explained by a modern distaste for the early 19th century Romantic appetite for the exotic and sentimental; it can all seem a little hackneyed to more sophisticated/cynical minds! However, I found myself genuinely moved by some of the grief-stricken outpourings of the poor little Peri, the devotion of the doomed lovers and the tears of the grizzled soldier, whose repentance wins the Peri her prize of eternal bliss. Depite its sentimentality, there is also an appealing "period piece" charm to Thomas Moore's verse, adapted from "Lalla Rookh" (1817) and translated into German.

The performance is superlative: an array of the finest voices of their type headed by Barbara Bonney's silvery, limpid soprano soaring over the orchestra. She is complemented by lovely singing from Bernarda Fink and Cristoph Pregardien in particular. The clarity and drive of Gardiner's orchestra allows every detail of the score to emerge; one is made properly aware of how skilfully Schumann uses wind instruments and the harp to create magical, otherworldly colouring - and the Janissary music for the battle scene in Part 1 makes a pleasing change to the more sustained mood of pathos.

By all accounts, this is superior to all other recordings so far, not least because of Gardiner's excellent ear for pace and balance - but also because the line of soloists is so starry and this is the first recording to use period instruments (but not in that annoying "listen to me; don't I sound different?" way which sends some of us back to a modern orchestra!). The two minor supporting choral pieces are charming and skilful - worth hearing, but you would not buy these CD's for those alone.

A recording to shake up your perception of Schumann and shake out the cobwebs clinging to mid 19th century Romantic music performance.