In art there are few better fables of the fate of the underclass surviving without a social safety net than Alban Berg's first opera Wozzeck . Since its premiere in 1925, it's never seemed other than timely (there's no better proof than that the Nazis banned it as degenerate), and it again seems the stuff of headlines. Before it's banned anew, you might want to salt away a new recording or two, lullabies for a world on fire.
A certain austerity, sometimes punctuated by ear-battering outcries from the orchestra, is key to the work's power, and Andreas Homoki's spare production for Zurich Opera, captured in a live performance in 2015 (Accentus DVD/Blu-ray), takes its cues primarily from the music. The stage looks almost painted, and the individual scenes of the uninterrupted three acts are presented in what look like wooden picture frames; each successive scene appears in a frame within the previous one, compressing the claustrophobic drama the way the music does. Much of the action takes place as if on a news scroll, a treadmill that threatens to crush the players in its ineluctable roll.
The pictures, rightly, are surreal. The players have powdered faces, not in the 18th-century bewigged style but as if they had just escaped a bomb blast. The costume closest to realistic is Wozzeck's, underscoring his being a harried Everyman; he's a grunt soldier in the war waged by the forces who have what he does not: money. Homoki's production captures the obscenity of hiding the plights of the poor behind the five syllables of "inequality." Similarly, he makes the most of the blade with which Wozzeck tries futilely to shave the moralizing Captain in the opening scene, keeping it to hand for the dirty work of his deranged murder of his common-law wife Marie and his demise at his own hand.
Christian Gerhaher �" a baritone of such refinement that he might not seem a natural for the title role like, say, the more rugged, blunt Matthias Goerne is �" digs as deeply into the part as did the similarly qualified Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in an earlier generation. He simply makes you forget the Gerhaher of the recital platform, as mesmerizing as that singer is �" and that this is singing and acting of an established text and, most critically, that you are in the theater at all.
Physical acting of the caliber he delivers �" leaping about the picture frames as if they were the uneven bars at the Olympics (some of his colleagues are noticeably more unnerved by them) �" would alone set a new standard in the role; but then there is the singing. More than in any Lieder performance I've heard from this consummate song specialist, the focus is all on the words hauntingly fused to tones, rightfully refusing to delineate singing from speech as though the two were opposed �" "Spechstimme" of the truest, most penetrating sort. If I hadn't heard it with my own ears while simultaneously seeing it with my own wondering eyes, I would not ask you to believe that when the rightfully terrified Marie, looking death in the face, asks him what's going on, Gerhaher's Wozzeck replies, "Nothing," slowly and with chilling clarity sounding out every single successive letter of the German word, N-i-c-h-t-s, "singing" on the consonants, too.
It's a dizzyingly great performance, but the singing is superb from everyone, not the least the Drum Major, San Francisco favorite Brandon Jovanovich. Homoki ensures credible interplay between him and Gun-Brit Barkmin's Marie in their coarse yet clearly relished sex play �" just the thing to send Wozzeck over the edge believably. In the other pit, that is, the orchestra's, Fabio Luisi again demonstrates his flair for wringing the maximum drama out of a 12-tone score while articulating it precisely.
Naxos' new Wozzeck, a Houston Symphony performance recorded live in 2013, is a less fevered reading of the score but hardly tepid. Hans Graf gets acute playing from the orchestra, and the cast, including some starry names, responds with strongly committed performances. If it all comes off something less than incandescent, that's likely owing to the fact that these musicians are veterans in many senses of the term.
From the proximate first howls of Marc Molomot's Captain, the singers convey the feeling that Berg might not have meant quite what he notated demandingly yet so carefully. When the singing slides into something closer to speech, there's a nagging sense of cutting corners. Roman Trekel's Wozzeck is, gratefully, the clearest and best sung, but it stops short of making you catch your breath. Soprano Anne Schwanewilms, a natural for Marie, disappoints. The opera has often suffered from assigning this pivotal role to a diva at career's end, and Schwanewilm's predictable acuity with the text is not enough to compensate for her matronly Marie.