Christian Thielemann - Schoenberg: Pelleas & Melisande ~ Wagner: Siegfried-Idyll

Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Schoenberg's Pelleas & Melisande is just Opus 5 in Schoenberg's catalog, but it comes right on the cusp of the young composer's transition to serialism. Based on Maurice Maeterlinck's stage play, it's an exuberant, youthful work that won the 29-year-old composer the recognition he had yet to receive. The work shows some influences of Richard Strauss, who had befriended Schoenberg in 1901 in Berlin. Mahler is also present. Still, for all that, this work is sui generis, a stand-alone masterpiece. It's followed by Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll, a tone poem based on the birth of his son, Siegfried. Both works are moody tone poems and maestro Christian Thielemann lovingly captures their spirit. Boulez might give Schoenberg more drama, but Thielemann sculpts both works with rounder edges and softer textures. Highly recommended. --Paul Cook

Christian Thielemann - Schoenberg: Pelleas & Melisande ~ Wagner: Siegfried-Idyll, Music, Arnold Schoenberg, Richard Wagner, Christian Thielemann, Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin, 20th/21st Century Tone Poem/Symphonic Poem, Classical, Classical Composers, Classical Music, Orchestral, Orchestral & Symphonic, Romantic Orchestral Music

Christian Thielemann - Schoenberg: Pelleas & Melisande ~ Wagner: Siegfried-Idyll
Average customer rating:

Making Schoenberg easier to hear

Excellent recording and performance

Deep unfinished darkness, and floating spaces.

Another Excellent CD From A Great Young Conductor

Another hit

Christian Thielemann - Schoenberg: Pelleas & Melisande ~ Wagner: Siegfried-Idyll
Arnold Schoenberg , Richard Wagner , Christian Thielemann , and Orchester der Deutschen Oper Berlin
Manufacturer: Deutsche Grammophon
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: B00004YZ34
Release Date: 2000-11-14

Tracks:

Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: Die ein wenig bewegt - zogernd
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: Heftig
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: Lebhaft (Rehearsal number 9)
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: Sehr rasch (16)
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: Ein wenig bewegter (33)
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: Langsam (36)
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: Ein wenig bewgter (43)
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: Sehr langsam (50)
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: Etwas bewegt (55)
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: In gehender Bewegung (59)
Pelleas und Melisande op. 5: Breit (62)
Siegfried - Idyll

Amazon.com

Schoenberg's Pelleas & Melisande is just Opus 5 in Schoenberg's catalog, but it comes right on the cusp of the young composer's transition to serialism. Based on Maurice Maeterlinck's stage play, it's an exuberant, youthful work that won the 29-year-old composer the recognition he had yet to receive. The work shows some influences of Richard Strauss, who had befriended Schoenberg in 1901 in Berlin. Mahler is also present. Still, for all that, this work is sui generis, a stand-alone masterpiece. It's followed by Wagner's Siegfried-Idyll, a tone poem based on the birth of his son, Siegfried. Both works are moody tone poems and maestro Christian Thielemann lovingly captures their spirit. Boulez might give Schoenberg more drama, but Thielemann sculpts both works with rounder edges and softer textures. Highly recommended. --Paul Cook

Customer Reviews:

Making Schoenberg easier to hear.......2007-05-12

The oung Thirleann was taking on two musical giants--Karajan and Boulez--when he made this recording of Schoenberg's immense, complex tone poem Pelleas und Melisande. Wioth hindsight it's hard to undestand how so many composers went wild for Maeterlink's play, which holds no interest today except as the basis for the music it inspired from Debussy, Schoenberg, Faure, and many more. Although a relative novice at composition, the 29-year-old Schoenberg here displays his enormous intellect and a taste for weaving a rapestry of inner detail that is nearly impossible to follow by ear. True, there are actual leitmotifs to identify the main characters and events in the play, but evey they are difficult to follow.

Karajan and Boulez offered readings that brought out as much of Schoenberg's counterpoint as humanly possible, and for that reason, along with the astonishing virtuosity of the Berlin Phil. and Chicago Sym., their recordings far outclass this one. But Thielemann has one advantage: he simplifies the work by emphasizing its sweep and downplaying its inner workings. In a sense he's made Schoenberg easier to follow, and for that I was grateful. If it weren't for his two great rivals, this recording would probably eke out five stars. The Siegfried Idyll gets a nice performance that is in no way memorable.

Excellent recording and performance.......2005-04-01

I have a few recordings of P & M and this is probably the best.

This is such a vast piece with huge orchestra and lots of inner parts, etc. and this recording brings them out very well. The performance is great too: nice and over the top where it counts.

The Siegfried Idyll is done well too.

Deep unfinished darkness, and floating spaces........2002-08-23

Schoenberg had moved to Berlin in December 1901 with a position emanation from the Uberbrettl cabaret and stayed until 1903, and the writing of Pelleus und Melisande came to dominate these excursis, this exergue to something. I don't know if the mountainous orchestration of Gurrelieder had helped this creativity.One needs to free oneself from creative burdens not impose them continually.
In retrospect in these gargantuan works,I find Schoenberg's utilization of stark contrapuntal lines,(here however impacted in dense orchestrations)and as manifested in the subsequent piano music to be the most interesting,his timbral focus for the new dodecaphonic language to come,was quite fascinating as the "Five Pieces for Orchestra"where lines function around contrapuntal unfoldings and timbral lacunae. It is always fascinating to see where the epistemologic creative seeds reside,the concept of destiny, and fate was, recall please a working premise of the post-romantic spirit. As Arnold Hauser said someplace that there is no product of modern art,no emotional impulse to modern man/woman,that does not owe some debt to romanticism,its delicacy, and conception to the exhuberance, the anarchy and violence of modern art," its drunken stammering,lyricism,its unrestrained,unsparing exhibitionism is derived from it" where themusic may become nourished.
Certainly Maeterlinck's dramatic encrustations( a time Freud was well into numerous studies,1901-1905) saw this penumbral darkness as a starting canvas for modernity,for the unexplained, the trace as Derrida said some decades subsequent. Pelleus here has long captured the spirit of this transitional period with Debussy and Sibelius and Schoenberg as well his suitable imagination and with Richard Strauss still in his blood chose eight of the fifteen scenes, this dark symbolic drama of lechery,obsession,aging,love,brooding penumbral dimensions. This voyage also sees creative parallels in Melisande's Wanderings, as the wiorking image for Schoenberg's latter 'Erwartung' to come. The Tower scene of Melisande combing her long 12 foot hair; Hair as a sexual metaphor in those days of infinite boundless pleasure, desire. Alban Berg's analysis from 1920 reveals how the work distributes theses motives freely very much like a free floating timbral canvas of motivic associations. Gilles Deleuze had thought of Wagner's 'Ring' in similar ways, as free floating leitmotiv All within these various motives scattered graciously throughout this long impacted lumbered work have this melodic sweeping character,and all lend a deeply lyrical gesture assuming differing traces of instrumental colours, as the, Solo Violin,walls of brass, and English Horn. Thielemann has no trouble with this full cathedral timbre which I thought it was at first too predictable and overbearing, too lead heavy leading one's sensibility to unwanted wanton darknesses.Illumination should also be a point of reference here.Melisande's unknown innocence perhaps,her foible naive constitution as a constrast to the brooding darkness which pervades the work.
But where does the work reside? The Boulez with The Chicago Symphony as well I found, you may find a greater telescoping of the work's dimensions, where it feels more compact than it actually is.Boulez's genius is that he always reveals another way,an alternative to tradition.
Berg's analysis again points to the work the structure as a Sonata Symphony. But Schoenberg thought it something else. Who knows what. Like the quip on pregnancy, either you are, or are not. Schoenberg recall had advised the young Berg, that his 12 Tone Opera(Wozzeck) had no chance of success. But Schoenberg always had harbored structural problems he had no way of solving, and here in Pelleus he had no great convictions of the amount of return of the distributive motives necessary for structural coherance.This is why shorter durational forms as his pathbreaking 'Pierrot' and again the piano music discovers incredibly frutiful lands to occupy. Let me gently bash just one more time. Schoenberg had no means to finish 'Moses und Aron' either, was it a testament to what is known, or what should be known. It is this incompletedness, this opaque creativity of indescision which I in fact find the most fascinating aspect of Schoenberg's creativity. That he set before himself conceptual durational problems he had no way to resolve.

The Wagner Idyll here Theilemann makes it float as well,downgrading the Wagner penchant for conviction of rhythmic purpose. It is a work far more to do with space than I once had known. Again the Berlin musicians bring their typical seemless bottom to top timbral conception.
But Theilemann does hold the reins quite taut, quite strongly which then gives his Berlin players enough conceputal space to breath.

Another Excellent CD From A Great Young Conductor.......2001-12-01

Christian Thielemann's recording of these works by Schoenberg and Wagner should further enhance his reputation as one of the foremost interpreters of late 19th Century/early 20th Century German Romantic music. Both are spellbinding performances of these tone poems, played with ample grace and warmth from the Deutsche Oper's pit orchestra. Thielemann's interpretation of Schoenberg's tone poem, is more lush than Boulez's, opting to emphasize the Romantic ties which bind the early Schoenberg to predecessors such as Wagner and Mahler. Still, it is a truly original composition which foreshadows Schoenberg's interest in atonal music. The sound quality is exemplary, no doubt due to the splendid acoustics of the same studio used by Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in many of their classic 1960's and 1970's recordings.

Another hit.......2001-05-31

Schoenberg is not normally a composer that I have much time for, but Thielemann and the Orchestra of the German Opera in Berlin certainly shave off a few of his rougher edges. I can't say that I am now won over by Schoenerg, but I am willing to explore further. The album is well played and recorded. The Wagner too is very well presented.

I am becoming more and more impressed by Thielemann. His love of the German repertoire shows.

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