United Strings of Europe: Through the Night
BIS

Building on the momentum generated by three earlier BIS releases (In Motion, Renewal, Tchaikovsky), the London-based United Strings of Europe (USE) and violinist/director Julian Azkoul now turn their attention to two seminal post-romantic works and four shorter pieces, all of them sharing a nocturnal thematic connection. Grounding Through the Night are Richard Strauss's Metamorphosen and Arnold Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, with string arrangements of vocal pieces by Maddelena Casulana, Carlo Gesualdo, and Henry Purcell and a new work by British composer Daniel Kidane rounding out the programme. While the material spans nearly 500 years, the seventy-eight-minute recording's united by the conviction with which each piece is delivered and the magnificent sound of the ensemble's lustrous strings.

Key to the album is the associated idea of the wee hours as a site for change and transformation, something literally referenced in Transfigured Night, the English title of Schoenberg's work. The idea likewise emerges in Metamorphosen, composed in the final year of World War II, and in Kidane's Be Still, the writing of which grew out of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In all such cases, the notion of change, with all of the struggles it entails, is critical to understanding and appreciating the work in question.

Given the year when it was written, it's natural to tie the intended meaning of Metamorphosen to the end of WWII; its general theme, however, allows for other interpretations, making it possible for it to be seen as a self-reflection by Strauss as he neared the end of his life and anticipated whatever transformation death would bring. In writing ‘In Memoriam' at the end of the score (with a quote from the funeral march of Beethoven's ‘Eroica' Symphony), Strauss could just as easily have been referring to himself as to a world torn apart by death and destruction; certainly the work's elegiac dimension suggests a composer looking back and mourning what's been lost. The version the USE presents is an alluring new arrangement by violinist Éric Mouret for sixteen (as opposed to the original twenty-three) strings. The slightly smaller size allows for greater clarity and separation between the instruments; the ensemble is still large enough, however, to convey the epic grandeur of Strauss's conception and the splendour of its chromatic shifts. To monitor this towering work's organic unfolding is an experience that never fails to reward and absorb.

Rivaling it in dramatic impact is Verklärte Nacht, the version presented by the USE the 1943 one for string orchestra. Composed in just three weeks in the summer of 1899, the half-hour work is performed without pause, though its five component sections are clearly discernible. That it is so enduring is easy to explain when its emotional, Wagner-esque outpourings are so intense and its expressions of yearning so powerful. The 1896 poem of the same title by the composer's friend Richard Dehmel provides a programmatic analogue to the music: as a couple walk through a forest on a moonlit night, she reveals to her new partner that she's pregnant by another; instead of abandoning her, he promises he will love the child as his own. Progressing through contrasting episodes of serenity and turmoil, the work is at its most affecting during the escalating call-and-response declarations that imbue the second half with intense romantic longing, and the final five minutes of the USE's performance are particularly heavenly.

Metamorphosen and Verklärte Nacht cast huge shadows, but the shorter pieces nevertheless add to the recording in significant ways, diversity being one. Published in 1566 as part of a collection of madrigals (Il Desiderio libro primo), Casulana's Morir non può il mio cuore appears here in an arresting string arrangement by Simon Parkin that sees solo string quartet parts converging with the string orchestra to hymnal and haunting effect. Playing crotales, percussionist Beibei Wang joins the ensemble for the world premiere recording of Kidane's Be Still (2020), a delicate, shimmering, and tremulous tapestry inspired during the writing stage by T. S. Eliot's “Burnt Norton,” the first of his Four Quartets. Published in 1611, Gesualdo's spiritual madrigal Tristis est anima mea appears in a stirring arrangement by American composer and violinist Michi Wiancko. Through the Night closes on a plaintive note with a stirring Leopold Stokowski arrangement of Dido's Lament, taken from the tragic final scene in Purcell's opera Dido and Aeneas (1689).

December 2023