Infinite Voyage: Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg, Chausson
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Label: Alpha
Cat No: ALPHA1000
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Release Date: 8th September 2023
Contents
Works
String Quartet, op.3Chanson perpetuelle, op.37
Melancholie: 4 songs for soprano and string quartet, op.13
String Quartet no.2 in F sharp minor, op.10
Artists
Emerson String QuartetBarbara Hannigan (soprano)
Bertrand Chamayou (piano)
Works
String Quartet, op.3Chanson perpetuelle, op.37
Melancholie: 4 songs for soprano and string quartet, op.13
String Quartet no.2 in F sharp minor, op.10
Artists
Emerson String QuartetBarbara Hannigan (soprano)
Bertrand Chamayou (piano)
About
The title of this album evokes not only the life-long journey of all these musicians, but also a lasting friendship between soprano Barbara Hannigan and the Emerson String Quartet. One of the greatest string quartets of the last four decades, the Emersons will disband in October 2023. Barbara and the Emersons were determined to record Schoenberg's Quartet no.2 since they started performing the work together in 2015. "The sheer sonic scope of this work takes us on a voyage into previously uncharted territory," say the Emerson musicians. "It's like a tall, gnarly tree to climb (all the way to another planet, it seems), yet one with deep and emotional roots," continues Barbara Hannigan. "The soprano’s fin-de-siècle primal scream at the end of the third movement, begging to be relieved of love, is a heavy hitter". Melancholie is a rare and intimate work by the young Hindemith, "a gem of a piece" that the Canadian soprano has wanted to explore for many years. The fascinating Quartet, op.3, composed by Berg in 1909 as he was finishing his apprenticeship with Schoenberg, features the quartet on its own. And to round out the album, pianist Bertrand Chamayou joins Barbara and the Emersons for another deeply moving encounter by way of Chausson's heartbreaking Chanson perpétuelle.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Hindemith: Melancholie, op.13: 1. Die Primeln blühn und grüßen...
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2Hindemith: Melancholie, op.13: 2. Nebelweben
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3Hindemith: Melancholie, op.13: 3. Dunkler Tropfe
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4Hindemith: Melancholie, op.13: 4. Traumwald
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5Berg: String Quartet, op.3: 1. Langsam
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6Berg: String Quartet, op.3: 2. Mäßige Viertel
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7Chausson: Chanson perpétuelle, op.37
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8Schoenberg: String Quartet No.2, op.10: 1. Mäßig
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9Schoenberg: String Quartet No.2, op.10: 2. Sehr rasch
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10Schoenberg: String Quartet No.2, op.10: 3. Litanei. Langsam
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11Schoenberg: String Quartet No.2, op.10: 4. Entrückung. Sehr langsam
Europadisc Review
After a career spanning the best part of half a century as one of the world’s leading chamber groups, the Emerson String Quartet – entering a well-deserved retirement next month – present their final recording. As with many of their finest discs over the years, this one sees them in collaborative mode, in this instance with star soprano-conductor Barbara Hannigan, with whom they have worked frequently over the last eight years. And it’s also something of a milestone for the Alpha label, bearing the number ALPHA1000 – no mean achievement for this French-based imprint founded in 1999, which has developed an enviable back-catalogue chiefly known for its focus on early music, but covering much else besides.
In recent years, Alpha has excelled in putting together discs with compelling themed programmes, and for the Emersons’ last studio outing the album title ‘Infinite Voyage’ refers in particular to the voyage from late tonality to atonality that took place around the turn of the 20th century, and which is alluded to in the final movement of Schoenberg’s groundbreaking Second String Quartet. Famously, this work, composed in 1907–08, adds a soprano to the ensemble in the last two of its four movements, singing texts by Stefan George. It is in the second of these – entitled ‘Entrückung’ (‘ecstasy’, ‘transcendence’ or ‘transport’) that the singer utters the words ‘I feel air from another planet’. And this seems like the perfect metaphor for the loosing of the bonds of tonality and the journey towards atonality (in which no key is discernible as the centre of gravity) which takes place in the course of this work.
Nevertheless, Schoenberg’s quartet ends unexpectedly in the key of F sharp major – the tonic major of the first movement’s F sharp minor, and also (coincidentally) the key of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony of just two years later. But however welcoming the close of the quartet may sound, the groundwork has been laid for a journey that would eventually lead, via ‘free’ atonality, to the twelve-tone serialism that would shake music to its core.
For Hannigan, the ‘Infinite Voyage’ is also one undertaken when ‘we first set our little feet on the path towards becoming a musician, to the neverending relationship we develop with our chosen instrument and with our colleagues.’ And the listener gets a taste of this voyage here in the way she and the quartet members mesh and gel in works that, however challenging for the listener in places, leap vividly from the speakers in an act of expressive communication.
The disc opens with Hindemith’s rarely-heard Melancholie, op.13, of 1919. Composed during the last months of World War I, in which Hindemith served on the Western Front, it’s a far cry from the ‘New Objectivity’ for which he would later become known. It sets four poems by Christian Morgenstern which contain thinly-veiled references to the horrors and sadness of war, and is dedicated to his friend Karl Köhler who died at the front. Each of these settings for mezzo-soprano and string quartet inhabits a distinct key, yet the tonality is often ‘stretched’ in an expressionist manner not far removed from Schoenberg’s earlier output. Most haunting is the third song, ‘Dunkler Tropfe’ (‘Dark drop’), whose halting C minor in this performance brilliantly conveys the ‘dark drop of death’ into ‘the cup of life’. The similarly vivid second movement ‘Nebelweben’ (‘Fog-weaving’) is cast in F sharp minor, and the final movement, ‘Traumwald’, ends in F sharp major, creating a pleasing link with the Schoenberg quartet that ends the programme.
After the Hindemith comes Alban Berg’s two-movement String Quartet, op.3, composed in 1910 but not published until ten years later. The only work on the programme for string quartet alone, as well as the only purely atonal one, it is a rich, dense score, and the Emersons’ account is both expansive and full of fabulous detail. With a slow first movement in tightly argued sonata form teeming with ideas, and a moderately-paced second movement in rondo form, this is a work that repays repeated listening. The grainy immediacy of the playing (recorded, unlike the rest of the items, in New York’s Stony Brook University Staller Center rather than Hilversum’s Musiekcentrum van de Omroep) adds to the vividness of this superb account.
Ernest Chausson’s Chanson perpétuelle, op.37, in its version for voice and piano quintet, may seem a long way from such atonality, yet Berg’s trademark lyricism and the stretching of expressive boundaries in Chausson’s intense account of an abandoned, suicidal lover take on new aspects when placed side by side. With exquisite teamwork from pianist Bertrand Chamayou and the Emersons, this is a wonderfully poised performance, the sinewy lines of the accompanimental strands adding extra depth to this poignant work – Chausson’s last completed opus before his death in a freak cycling accident at the age of just 44. The suicidal sentiments of the protagonist seem to anticipate some of the expressionist anxieties of turn-of-the-century Mitteleuropa, yet it’s still astonishing to think that this delicate yet powerful chamber mélodie was written a mere 10 years before Schoenberg’s Second Quartet which follows here.
The anxieties of the age – as well as Schoenberg’s own troubled private life – are laid bare in the quartet that the whole programme has been building towards. This is as immersive an account of this masterpiece as we’ve heard, its sheer dynamic and tonal range, and the deftly executed shifts of gear in the second-movement Scherzo that caused such a scandal at the work’s premiere, are brought off with tremendous conviction plus the wisdom of many years’ playing. Hannigan’s minutely attentive yet thrillingly communicative singing brings the despairing ‘Litanei’ and the gradually more ecstatic and intense ‘Entrückung’ urgently to life. The way she communicates George’s texts is a lesson in itself. The Emersons have a similar command of expressionist and early modernist nuance throughout this landmark work, and it sets the seal on one hell of a final bow: a powerful end to a glorious career on record!
Reviews
the players’ nuances and range of colours are still formidable, and the recording makes each pizzicato note something you feel in your stomach. They are a class act, and will be missed.The Times 8 September 2023
These are warm, lustrous performances … Barbara Hannigan is the soprano in the Schoenberg, her elegance and cool, precise shaping of every phrase perfectly tailored to the keenly expressive vocal lines … There’s also room on the disc for a couple of beautifully rendered rarities. Guardian top 10 classical recordings of 2023The Guardian 21 December 2023
Their final recording, “Infinite Voyage,” with bracing yet seductive works by Schoenberg, Hindemith, Berg and Chausson, was released last month, featuring Hannigan.“We were rehearsing onstage,” she said, recalling her farewell appearance with the group on Oct. 10 in Milan, in Schoenberg’s Second Quartet. “And they were still playing it over slowly, tuning every note, discussing, ‘Is this really the right tempo?’ It was the last rehearsal before a piece they will never play again, and they were still saying: ‘What do you think he meant here?’”
The New York Times 19 October 2023
It is in major works by Berg and Schoenberg that the Emerson Quartet come to the fore, with recordings of admirable clarity in the most convoluted of textures and with all their special ability to project the full richness and seriousness of the musical material. ... no singer in [Schoenberg’s] Op 10 can surpass Barbara Hannigan in anatomising its searing mix of primitive and spiritually aspiring states of mind, matched to the hilt by the Emerson’s close-knit delineation of the massed shards of motivic elements the music throws out in its quest for transcendence. Arnold WhittallGramophone October 2023
This weekend, the quartet will play its last concerts ever, at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. The group, which formed in 1976, has recorded more than forty albums, including all sixteen Beethoven quartets. (Its swan song, “Infinite Voyage,” came out in September.) In a field accustomed to half-full auditoriums, their concerts sell out. It’s like when One Direction broke up – except that One Direction never won a Grammy, and the Emersons have nine.The New Yorker 16 October 2023
This wonderful parting gift from the quartet features warm lustrous performances of Schoenberg’s Second Quartet (with soprano Barbara Hannigan) and Berg’s opus 3, plus two beautifully rendered rarities by Hindemith and Chausson ... Alban Berg’s Op 3 Quartet, completed in 1910, two years after his teacher Schoenberg’s Second but not published until 10 years later, makes a logical companion piece, and the Emersons give both works warm, lustrous performances, more generous than many of their earlier, more objective recordings. Barbara Hannigan is the soprano in the Schoenberg, her elegance and cool, precise shaping of every phrase perfectly tailored to the keenly expressive vocal line... Andrew ClementsThe Guardian 8 September 2023
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