Texans Ride Tall With the Masters

During a visit to L.A. last season to make a guest appearance with our Philharmonic, Christoph Eschenbach, the conductor of the Houston Symphony, expressed a wry pleasure in his seeming success not only in finding an audience in Texas for the music of the masters of the Second Viennese School--Schoenberg and his prize pupils, Berg and Webern-- but also “an audience that was coming back after intermission.”

That Eschenbach has a profound feeling for this music, that he considers it as much life’s blood as the more familiar, older classics, is manifest in a pair of new releases on the Koch label.

With the Houston Symphony at full strength and in full cry, Schoenberg’s early, gleefully overwrought “Pelleas und Melisande” is delivered with the dramatic thunder one expects in Mahler, whose world, it might be noted, isn’t far from the young Schoenberg’s (Koch 7316).

The trick with the massive, bottom-heavy “Pelleas” is to make it move and coalesce--it does neither on its own. When treated right, as it is here, it’s gorgeous stuff: a yearning, burning love child of Wagner, with chromaticism taken to the outer limits of tonality.

All of this would be impossible without an orchestra responsive to the needs of both conductor and composer. The Texans carry out their assignment with the requisite opulence of tone and a degree of solo and ensemble technical mastery that no amount of electronic magic can simulate. The handsome-sounding CD is filled out by an equally persuasive account of Webern’s youthfully lush Passacaglia, a sort of graduation exercise from the Schoenberg master class.

Nothing is more conducive to enabling an orchestra to reach its peak than playing chamber music, which Eschenbach has made an integral part of the Houstonians’ activities during his seven years on the scene. The first recording by the Houston Symphony Chamber Players is not only a triumph for the dozen first-chair players involved but as fine a cross section of the intimate side of the Second Viennese School as we’ve had on recordings (Koch 7337).

The program consists of some of Webern’s most potent miniatures, the spectral Concerto, Opus 24, and the sets of pieces for cello and piano and violin and piano, and Schoenberg’s vast Wind Quintet.

The interpretations, all presumably guided by Eschenbach (who participates as pianist in all but the Quintet), are models of clarity and affection. The string playing avoids the slightest hint of the dry, vibrato-less squealing that often passes for stylishness in this repertory, while the winds and brass are quite simply stunningly good.

But the ultimate treat of this generously filled CD is Eschenbach’s solo turn in Berg’s Piano Sonata, Opus 1, which in his knowing hands is as much the last of the great Romantic sonatas as a cornerstone of the modern repertory.

By contrast, in their Schoenberg/Webern program, which also includes the latter’s Opus 24, Eliahu Inbal and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony (Denon 78977) are merely dutiful--and sometimes well short of meeting the scores’ technical requirements. The major item is Schoenberg’s spectacular unfinished oratorio “Die Jakobsleiter,” inspired by Jacob’s vision, in Genesis, of a ladder used by the angels to commute between heaven and Earth. Typically for Schoenberg, the passive Jacob doesn’t even appear in the oratorio. Its protagonist, rather, is the archangel Gabriel, charged with the agonizing decisions as to which earthlings are worthy of entering the pearly gates.

This new version lacks both the scorching intensity of Pierre Boulez’s conducting in the recent Sony reissue (48462) and the vocal strength and security of his principals, particularly Siegmund Nimsgern as Gabriel and Mady Mesple as the Soul, in that 1980 performance with the BBC Symphony and the BBC Singers. The Sony edition--at mid-price, by the way--also includes as fiery a traversal of the epochal Opus 9 Chamber Symphony as one is likely to find on or off the planet, by Boulez and his Ensemble InterContemporain.