The whole week before the election, I found myself listening to nothing but Goetterdaemmerung and honestly wasn't sure why. When I tweeted about it, I learned that other music-lovers equally confident of an HRC win had done the same. Gratefully for us, there's some new "high-class" music that addresses and expresses our political outrage.
It's as if St. Cecilia herself heard my prayer. Hyperion recently released baritone Florian Boesch's recording of Ernst Krenek's Reisebuch aus den oesterreichischen Alpen (Travelogue from the Austrian Alps, with pianist Roger Vignoles), a rare event that could have gone unnoticed were not the recording so very fine and suddenly, horribly timely. It's one of the last century's greatest German song cycles. Krenek, who also wrote the texts, encapsulates the uncomfortable period between the two world wars with an unlikely vessel: a European wanderer's escapade as tourist. Even in 1929, travel was its own trial, and the singer is not shy about his disdain for the crowds, most of whom seem more interested in photographing things than in actually seeing them. Selfie, anyone?
The sensibility is Schubertian Wanderer, and as Schubert did in Winterreise, the cycle moves from deceptively bumptious naivete (of the Bavarian "take cheer" type) to warier, more sinister sentiments. At the end of the second section, the traveler takes a moment to revile the Alpine locals, but more, the "grasshopper-like" hordes of tourists who descend on the place. "Seldom do you see native people dull and bored; they observe the horror and silently calculate the profit they will coax from the pockets of these strangers from the north." Me an expat in Thailand, Asia's premiere tourist destination, he's singing my song.
But in Section 3, Politics, new horrors come into prospect. Krenek would become one of the many Jewish composers who emigrated to the U.S. to escape the Final Solution, and in 1929 it was already clear to him what was coming. "Remember the times, brothers, when thousands of us fell daily, victims of evil? Brothers, send the bloody clown packing, once and for all, shut down the macabre circus �" enough is enough." The "bloody clown" is Hitler, striking up his "macabre circus," and as they say, the rest you know.
Naivete is extinguished by the Epilogue, which ends with an expression of qualified hope. "I live, and do not know how long. I die, and do not know when. I walk and do not know where. Is this the final wisdom of every journey, indeed of all life? Despite that, I do not wonder that I am, despite everything, happy."
The music is varied, some of it richly colored, some of it monochrome. It's nowhere near as difficult as, say, Schoenberg's The Book of the Hanging Gardens. It's closer to the sound and sensibility of Hugo Wolf, with comparable challenges and rewards for the pianist, to which Vignoles rises splendidly.
Boesch is in that category of singers I most cherish. His technique is rock-solid, his musicianship both instinctive and honed, his aspiration nothing short of maximal communication. But it's one of those voices that keeps its owner on alert; when the mouth falls open, anything could come out, some of it invertebrate. But as a listener you know what was meant. This recording finds Boesch at his mellifluous best, but still venturing all manners of sound, many of them near speech. He rounds off the recital with four early Alexander Zemlinsky songs in the same mood as Krenek's.
Some of us do better with acknowledgement that these are dark times, and that others have been through them, with the same minimal confidence that things will work out. Few composers have been as eloquent or clever about life under authoritarian rule as Dmitri Shostakovich, and few of Shostakovich's interpreters have been as keenly responsive as Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons. The second volume of the Boston Symphony's Under Stalin's Shadow, commemorating live performances under Nelsons, arrives with the sinister symphonies Five, Eight and Nine (with a slice of wry: not so "incidental" Hamlet ).
As with the first installment's towering 10th, the playing and the thought behind it are staggering. Along with the darkness there are the composer's sly deceptions in defiance of tyranny, and you shiver to their canny boldness. The Fifth is surely Shostakovich's best-known symphony, but Nelsons and the Bostonians make you feel you're at the premiere, because in so many ways you are.