Gurrelieder in the Helsinki Music Centre, the 16th of August, 2019

Arnold Schönberg’s “Gurrelieder” (Gurre-songs) is not one of those classical music pieces that you hear every day. The reason is, of course, that the group of performers is huge: the orchestra is a double symphony orchestra and in addition to the soloists, it has three choirs

Gurrelieder tells about King Waldemar and his love to Tove, whom his wife has killed in her jealousy. Waldemar curses God and ends up riding for all eternity with his ghost army. The piece has got its name from the Castle of Gurre, where the events take place and the libretto is based on the poems of the Danish writer Jens Peter Jacobsen. 

Schönberg composed “Gurrelieder” in two parts in early 20^th century. Perhaps a bit surprisingly, you cannot hear the difference between these spouts of composing that clearly: there are some marks of more modern musical interpretations in the end part of the work, but that’s about it. As a whole the music of “Gurrelieder” is incredibly beautiful, even though this performance of Helsinki Festival was not of the best possible quality. The acoustics of the Helsinki Music Centre’s Main Hall is not perfect when there are so many performers and the choirs are situated on the seats usually meant for the audience at the back of the orchestra. But the tone of the orchestra was superb and I could have watched the work of the conductor Susanna Mälkki even without the music. You could practically hear the music in the movements of her body and her gestures. It was fascinating to watch!

Unfortunately, the main soloist, who sang the role of Waldemar (Torsten Kerl) had an ear infection and despite the fact that he held his hand over his ear, he obviously had difficulties to catch the orchestra. His voice was constantly drowned by the orchestra (which, of course, was big and had good volume) and regularly you could only assume that he was singing, since his mouth moved. It really was a pity that he had fallen ill, since despite his voice clearly breaking a couple of times, you could hear that he has a Wagner-tenor voice, so it would have been great to hear him sing in normal conditions

The most spectacular of the soloists was Katarina Karnéus, who sang the role of the Wood Dove. What a fantastic mezzosoprano; you could hear every beautiful nuance of her voice even when the orchestra was playing at full blast! I wish her role had been even bigger. My second favorite was Wolfgang Alinger-Sperrhacke, who sang the role of Klaus the Jester. Really suitable character tenor for this role. Usually I am a bit sceptic of character tenors, since their voices often are rather thin and tight, but even though Alinger-Sperrhacke’s voice is definitely not lyric, his voice has enough juiciness for this type of roles. Great performance.