The Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg’s long delayed and wildly over-budget concert hall, officially opened in January last year. The inaugural concert did include a new work – an orchestral song cycle by Wolfgang Rihm – but the major premiere of the celebrations followed two days later, when Kent Nagano and the Hamburg Philharmonic introduced Jörg Widmann’s evening-long oratorio, Arche.
It’s that first performance, involving soprano and baritone soloists Marlis Petersen and Thomas E Bauer, as well as adult and children’s choirs, an organ and a huge orchestra, all of them expertly marshalled by Nagano, which is now released on disc.
The title, “Ark”, comes from the striking appearance of the new hall itself, which Widmann saw as an “ark of culture”, overlooking the water in Hamburg. The music is designed as an exploration of the changing relationship between man and God, assembling a text in Latin and German that’s a mosaic of extracts, ranging chronologically from the Old Testament up to Nietzsche and Hans Andersen. The scheme of five large-scale movements seems to begin as a biblical pageant before transforming itself into a requiem mass: the first three parts, introduced by child narrators, deal with the creation of the world, the flood and the beginnings of love and evil, after which come a Dies Irae and a Dona Nobis Pacem.
Whether this becomes the ambitious statement Widmann envisaged is doubtful, and for all its fluency, the music doesn’t make it any more convincing. There are spectacular orchestral and choral effects, dramatically contrasted with passages of lieder-like simplicity, and as ever with Widmann, historical references abound within the polyglot score – the apocalyptic visions of the Dies Irae are answered by a setting of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, for instance, during which Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy is extensively quoted – but it all seems too pat, too contrived.
Other classical picks this week
Sunrise Falling, Pentatone’s two-disc collection of works by Isang Yun, played by the Bruckner Orchestra of Linz conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, provides belated recognition of last year’s centenary of the outstanding Korean composer of the 20th century, who spent the last 30 years of his life exiled in Germany. Together with some solo instrumental pieces and an orchestral showpiece, the main focus is a pair of substantial concertos. Matt Haimovitz is the superb soloist in the fiercely confrontational, single-movement Cello Concerto from 1976, surely one of the finest works for cello and orchestra of the last 50 years, while Yumi Hwang-Williams is equally accomplished in the more lyrical solo writing of the first of Yun’s three concertos for violin, composed five years later.
