Barbara Hannigan: Sehnsucht: Berg & Mahler: Live in Rotterdam
Alpha Classics

Recorded live on April 30th, 2021 at De Doelen in Rotterdam, Sehnsucht presents a terrific concert programme of two song cycles by Alban Berg (1885-1935) and the Symphony No. 4 in G Major by Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). If the lack of crowd noise seems unusual, the explanation's simple: the pieces were performed to an empty concert hall, concertgoers absent due to pandemic restrictions then in place. Such conditions and the character of the material align with the album title, Sehnsucht a word having to do with yearning, melancholy, and nostalgia.

Barbara Hannigan's totally compelling as a Berg interpreter, the soprano having earlier established a deep connection with the composer in her powerful personification of the tragic opera figure Lulu. Following her rendering of his Sieben Frühe Lieder, its arrangement for chamber orchestra by Reinbert de Leeuw, Dutch baritone Raoul Steffani delivers the composer's Vier Gesänge, op. 2 in an arrangement by Henk de Vliege. The focus then shifts to Mahler, his fourth even more arresting when presented in a chamber arrangement by Erwin Stein. Giving the recording a satisfying sense of shape, Hannigan returns to grace its final movement with her inimitable voice.

In all three works, Rolf Verbeek leads the Camerata RCO, its eleven musicians coming from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. Adding to the arresting presentation, accordion joins strings, woodwinds, percussion, piano, and harp in the ensemble. Whereas the two song cycles, composed not long after Mahler wrote his fourth, have been expanded from their original arrangements for voice and piano, the symphony exemplifies a highly intimate quality when executed by a chamber-sized outfit.

Berg and Mahler are, of course, a natural combination. Schoenberg's pupil had unreserved admiration for Mahler's music, and the distance separating the elder's late writing and some of the material in Sieben Frühe Lieder can start to seem small indeed. Many of the songs Berg composed by the age of twenty-five seem more characteristic of the nineteenth than twentieth centuries, an impression further reinforced when their lyrical focus is on love, death, dreams, and night. Seven of these early songs were later orchestrated, Sieben Frühe Lieder the result. The mystical “Nacht” (Night) exudes a suitably twilight quality, its haunting effect intensified by the transfixing vocal line and Hannigan's commanding realization. Here and in the song that follows, “Schilflield” (Song Amid the Reeds), it's possible to detect glimmerings of the writing that would emerge in Wozzeck. Less portentous is “Die Nachttigall” (The Nightingale) for its embracing Romantic tone and a vocal that sees the soprano singing as sweetly as the titular creature. The intensely atmospheric “Traumgekrönt” (Crowned with Dreams) and “Liebesode” (Ode to Love) intoxicate with rapturous swoon, after which “Sommertage” (Summer Days) ends the cycle on an exultant note.

The vocal baton passes to Steffani for Vier Gesänge, Op. 2, four songs written in 1909 and delivered with as much expressivity by him as the soprano in her cycle. Audible here is Berg grappling with the advances his teacher was making and incorporating them in his own way into his writing. “Schlafen, Schlafen, nichts als Schlafen” (Sleep, Sleep) and “Schlafend trägt man mich” (I am Borne in Sleep) prove as haunting as “Nacht”; if the fleeting “Nun ich der Riesen Stärksten überwand” (Now I've Conquered the Strongest Giants) possesses all the concision of a Webern miniature, “Warm die lüfte” (Warm the Breezes) finds Berg boldly venturing into atonal territory in a way that anticipates the operas to come.

The intimate treatment given the Mahler work by the Camerata RCO is apt for a work of its character. Preceded by three symphonies monumental in scale and thematic scope, the charming fourth, begun in 1899 and finished the following year, captivates with its lighter feel, though Mahler here too wrestles with profound themes. One need only compare the gravity of the towering adagio to the celestial serenity of the concluding movement to see the contrasts that play out across the nearly hour-long work.

At first, the opening of the first movement struck me as a tad sluggish, but with repeat listenings I warmed to the performance, and Verbeek's choice of tempi now seems to me sensitively attuned; the smaller ensemble size also grants the instruments clear separation, and their interplay resonates vividly as a result. The graceful splendour of the second movement is essayed as effectively, whether it be a buoyant passage or gently swooning one, and the twenty-minute adagio that follows is spectacular, its tender opening a thing of beauty and the largely delicate mood and slow pace sustained with excellent control. With a rhapsodic Hannigan rejoining the chamber group, the concluding “Sehr behaglich” (Life in Heaven) paints its picture ravishingly.

December 2022