The cover of this superb new SACD release from BIS, featuring a detail from Gustav Klimt’s ‘Beethovenfries’, perfectly evokes the fin-de-siècle atmosphere in which Franz Schreker, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Ernst Krenek first made their mark. All three composers would later be condemned by the Nazi regime as “degenerate”: Schreker’s music was banned outright, while Korngold and Krenek went into exile in the United States.

Schreker, the eldest of the three, is represented by the Overture (Vorspiel) to his opera ‘Die Gezeichneten’ (The Stigmatized) first staged in 1918. This opulent work is scored for a huge orchestra that includes 2 harps, a glockenspiel, bells, celesta and piano. Sascha Goetzel and the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire (ONPL) revel in the luscious, iridescent colour of the music and its erotic sensuousness with playing of the utmost refinement and sensitivity. Confusingly the disc cover and liner booklet describe the Overture heard here as ‘shortened version’ which it is not. While it is the case that in 1913 the composer did write an expanded concert version of what would later become the overture to the opera, entitled ‘Vorspiel zu ein Drama’ lasting around 20 minutes, it is an entirely separate piece and has never been the performing overture for the opera.

Korngold’s ‘Sinfonietta’, Op. 5, has attracted a handful of excellent recordings, but none in sound of this quality. Remarkably, Korngold was only fifteen when he completed the work, yet its expansive scope and masterly orchestration belie his youth. In all but name a full-scale symphony, the 43-minute piece unfolds across four movements of astonishing invention. Goetzel shapes the opening “Fliessend, mit heiteren Schwunge” (“flowing, with joyful vigour”) with both romantic sweep and structural clarity, drawing playing of brilliance and discipline from the ONPL. The scherzo crackles with rhythmic energy, its lyrical trio section foreshadowing the melodic warmth of the composer’s Hollywood scores decades later. A rapt slow movement leads into a barnstorming finale, delivered here with a thrilling balance of spontaneity and control.

Ernst Krenek (1900 - 1991) is hardly a household name and is probably best known, if at all, for his very successful 1927 “jazz opera” ‘Jonny spielt auf’ (Jonny Strikes Up) a work quickly banned as degenerate with the rise of the National Socialists. Though Krenek was a pupil of Franz Schrecker his music could hardly be more different and, in the course of his long and colourful life, he embraced a multitude of progressive idioms that ranged from late-Romanticism, impressionism, jazz and even to atonality. ‘Potpourri for Orchestra, op. 54’, premiered in the same year as the aforementioned opera, is an engagingly eclectic 18-minute melange of musical styles. Marches and waltzes rub shoulders with hints of a tango and cabaret jazz leaving the listener dazzled by Krenek’s orchestral imagination. Goetzel and the ONPL musicians despatch the piece with considerable panache and wit. If better known it would surely be a hit on any concert programme and its first appearance on SACD is particularly welcome
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The BIS 5.0 multi-channel recording on this SACD, made on the 9th -13th July2024 at the Centre de Congress, Angers, is outstanding; warm, wide-ranging with considerable amplitude, depth and presence, ideal for this extravagant repertoire.

This imaginatively programmed release, superbly performed, and captured in state-of-the-art sound merits the highest recommendation.

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