Zemlinsky - Complete Choral Works

Alexander von ZEMLINSKY (1872-1942)

Complete Choral Works

Psalm XIII

Psalm XXIII

Psalm LXXX

(2) Poems

Minnelied +

Hochzeitsgesang+^

Aurikelchen+

Frühlingsbegräbnis*

Cologne Gürzenich Orchestra

Düsseldorf Musikverein Chorus

James Conlon, Conductor

Romano Giefer, Organ^

Mülheim Kantorei+

Deborah Voigt, Soprano*

Donnie Ray Albert, Baritone*

The programme opens with the latest of the compositions, and it does so to very helpful effect. Zemlinsky wrote his setting of Psalm 13 in 1935, having been dismissed from the Kroll Opera in 1933, with only exile, which came in 1936, as the best he could hope for. The psalm (How long wilt Thou forget me?) is given the heading ‘Lament and Trust at a Time of Great Need’, and, beginning almost gently, in the manner of Brahms’s German Requiem, the music intensifies fearfully as with a vision of the horrors to come, turning at last to affirmation and a mood of strong resolve. As listeners, we then bring the experience of this to bear on the earlier works, in which we recognize as it were pre-echoes, but which, without that knowledge of the impending crisis, might seem complacent, even indulgent. As it is, the terrors of 1935 have their recognizably intense foreshadowing in the ‘valley of the shadow of death’ in Zemlinsky’s setting of Psalm 23 in 1910; and even Psalm 83 (1901) has its prescient balance of hope and anxiety.

The three psalm-settings, conceived separately and written over a wide period of time, constitute an impressive and moving major work. Smaller pieces follow, some dating back to 1895 and probably written for an amateur choral and orchestral association; gently pleasing, the music of a young man rejoicing in his opportunity to create beautiful sound and not striving for any assertive individuality. The Fruhlingsbegrabnis cantata goes deeper, with its Trauermusik and a yearning that momentarily (and consciously?) evokes the Sixth Symphony of Tchaikovsky.

The performances appear to have been fine ones, but they were recorded live and do not achieve a very satisfactory balance between orchestra and choir. This is particularly regrettable in the psalms, where the choir’s presence and the words need to be brought much more clearly into focus. Perhaps because the recordings derive from different occasions, they are not served as well as one might wish in the notes, nothing being given on the cantata, while the psalms and the other works are treated separately in two short essays instead of having their place in a single overall study which would have put the programme in context.'