Helga Pilarczyk appeared with Scherchen, a fervent champion of 'Erwartung', throughout the 1950s, and she also recorded the work for Robert Craft [CBS] and Vaclav Neumann [Praga Archives 250082].

This, however, from 1960, is the one to have: it finds the big voluptuous voice radiant, secure and in almost effortless form for the first time since LP record. This truly is 'Die Frau' as Isolde's nervous breakdown. Superb support from Scherchen; somewhat quirky, if well-documented presentation from Wergo in their anniversary year. Excellent sound.

Under the title of “studio reihe neuer musik”, Wergo released outstanding recordings in the 1960s, thus creating a trademark of advanced contemporary music in the label's early days. On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, Wergo now releases these highlights of 20th-century music history in an excellent sound quality in DSD for the first time.

Composed in the space of just eighteen feverish days in the late summer of 1909, Schoenberg's expressionist masterpiece Erwartung (Expectation) marks one of the undoubted highpoints in musical modernism. A 'monodrama' in four scenes for solo soprano and large orchestra to a text by Marie Pappenheim, it is of such complexity that it had to wait until 1924 for its premiere. The action traces the many contrastive emotions of a Woman ('eine Frau') wandering through a moonlit wood in search of her lover. At length she stumbles across his dead body, and it is all but revealed that she has killed him out of jealousy. Her feelings range the gamut from anger to guilt; and, via the stream-of-consciousness text — often fragmentary, and liberally peppered with ellipses — her consciousness constantly fluctuates between dream and reality.

Schoenberg's music for this work, which has been variously described as athematic and atonal, avoids all but the most local ostinato repetitions, ever-fluctuating like the text, now delicate, now explosive; the tempo changes are incessant, the orchestral colours kaleidoscopic. Yet the result is fundamentally an extension of the late-Romantic psychological dramas of Wagner and Strauss, in particular Kundry in Parsifal, Salome and Elektra, and a significant precursor of Berg's Wozzeck.

There have been a number of fine recordings over the years. This is one of the earlier ones, now making its long overdue first appearance on CD. It was recorded in Herford, North-Rhine Westphalia, in May and June 1960, and initially appeared on a 10-inch disc on the Véga label, before being reissued in 1964 on the pioneering Wergo label, one of the main sources of recorded twentieth-century music at the time.

The conductor is one of the leading figures in the post-war avant-garde, Hermann Scherchen, and he brings all his considerable experience to bear on the score, in a reading of great tension and flow. By modern standards, the recorded sound is rather basic. There is a degree of tape hiss (at least in the early stages), some odd orchestral balances, and an at times slightly cavernous acoustic. Some of the climaxes are distorted, and occasionally middle-register instruments (bassoons, horns) tend to congest the sound-picture. In all these respects, there are certainly more 'perfect' modern recordings out there, with a greater degree of transparency and detail given to Schoenberg's masterly orchestration. Yet there is at the same time a raw excitement here which eludes many more recent accounts.

The chief attraction, however, is the singing of Helga Pilarczyk (1925–2011). She started singing as an alto, only later switching to soprano, and also tackled mezzo roles in her operatic career. This helped to make her an ideal dramatic soprano and, although her repertoire was wide, she excelled in twentieth-century roles from Richard Strauss onwards. Her relatively few recordings (including Pierrot Lunaire with Boulez and Berg's Wozzeck Fragments with Doráti) emphasise her unsurpassed excellence in the modern repertoire. Her voice had a gleaming brilliance and power in many ways not unlike the great Birgit Nilsson. She coupled this with a phenomenal clarity in both the upper and lower registers, and the utmost sensitivity to the text.

This is the earliest of Pilarczyk's three recordings of Erwartung (the other two are currently deleted), and the results are simply phenomenal. She lives the part like no other singer, deftly negotiating both the demanding vocal lines and the mercurial swings of mood. No-one else has so successfully captured both the late-Romantic emotional power and the expressionistic angst of this seminal work. If it seems extravagant to reissue this 31-minute recording without any coupling, be assured: the price is worth it for the last thirteen minutes alone (effectively a Schoenbergian Liebestod), which here take on an unbelievable potency.

The packaging is extravagant, too, a full double-jewel case to accommodate a fascinating 32-page essay by veteran musicologist Helmut Kirchmeyer (one of the founders of the Wergo label) exploring at length Erwartung's roots in expressionism. There is, however, no information on the recording itself, nor on the artists involved. More seriously, there is neither libretto nor translation. Wergo have let themselves (and us) down here, especially as the texts are impossible to find online. There is also an unfortunate gap of some seconds at 06:26 into the fourth scene, where the original side change obviously was: this really should have been edited with much greater care.

Despite these significant reservations, this is an important release which, for Pilarczyk's peerless singing alone, demands to be heard.