Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and Rafael Payare: Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande & Verklärte Nacht
Pentatone

While they're eminently capable of tackling any work in the repertoire, the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and its Music Director Rafael Payare are gaining recognition as specialists in the Germanic post-Romantic tradition. Earlier Pentatone releases saw them presenting recordings of Mahler's Fifth Symphony and Rückert-Lieder and Strauss's Ein Heldenleben, and now Payare and company take on Arnold Schoenberg's late-Romantic masterpieces Verklärte Nacht and Pelleas und Melisande. Both are enduring programmatic works of vast emotional scope that showcase Schoenberg's early harmonic language. Narratives teeming with love, anguish, jealousy, sacrifice, and acceptance ceded the composer ample emotional material with which to work, and the resultant pieces present profound instrumental responses to the originating story-lines.

Predating Schoenberg's plunge into serialism, both works inhabit the kind of stylistic terrain one might associate with Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss and use to full advantage an orchestra's capacity for sumptuous expression. The scintillating performances by Payare and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal invite the listener to luxuriate in the engulfing textures of the music and be seduced by their rhapsodic lyricism. The works hew to the texts on which they're based, Richard Dehmel's eponymous poem in the case of Verklärte Nacht and Maurice Maeterlinck's Symbolist drama for the symphony tone poem Pelleas und Melisande.

In his treatment of Maeterlinck's material, Schoenberg focuses on the relationships between the characters Golo, Melisande, and Pelleas. Composed in 1902, the work opens with Golo and Melisande meeting and marrying, after which she fatefully encounters his half-brother Pelleas; a love scene between Pelleas and Melisande follows, as does the murder of Pelleas by Golo and finally the death of Melisande herself. In time-honoured fashion, Schoenberg uses leitmotifs as scaffolding for the work's design (there is a Melisande motif, for example, as well as a fate motif) and exploits extreme contrasts in mood throughout. Having evoked the forest setting where Golo and Melisande meet, the music swells romantically, growing ever more intense and passionate as they marry and she's brought to his castle. Forebodings of tragedy arise in a theme oozing catastrophe, after which love blossoms when she sees Pelleas and the music grows supplicating. Tonal shifts between joy and disaster occur with every expression of happiness ominously tainted with intimations of doom. Cryptic episodes alternate with bucolic ones until the deaths of Pelleas and finally Melisande infuse the music with grief. His passing's indicated by a particularly violent eruption, hers by disorientation and despair, after which the epilogue's recapitulated themes guide the tragedy-filled work to a satisfying resolution.

Composed in a mere three weeks during September 1899 (the version presented here is the one for string orchestra from 1943), Verklärte Nacht was composed using Dehmel's poem, published in 1896, as a guide. Its five verses document the interactions between a man and woman, she pregnant with another man's child and thus overcome with self-reproach and remorse, he accepting of her condition and willing to accept the child as his own. The half-hour work unfolds in six parts, with the opening movement, like that in Pelleas und Melisande, painting a nocturnal forest scene sprinkled with shimmering sounds and marked by dramatic anticipation. Verklärte Nacht too oscillates between plaintive expressions of romantic passion and anticipations of calamity. The music rises to suggest hope but then just as quickly turns desperate. String plucks punctuate agitated expressions as confusion and hysteria set in. Melodic phrases fluidly intertwine, with an occasional solo instrument extricating itself from the mass. With the onset of the brief third part, things take a downward turn before the radiance of the “Adagio” conveys the “beauty of moonlight” and the magnanimity of a man willing to accept a tragic situation and love another's yet-to-be-born child. Ascending affirmations by two solo strings during a late episode prove deeply affecting, but moments of beauty also surface in the peaceful “Poco adagio” and uplifting finale.

October 2024