Schönberg and Schubert String Works – Janine Jansen

Six players, one breath. That’s the first thing you notice about this new Decca coupling — the way Janine Jansen and her five colleagues seem to inhale together before the opening D minor sigh of Verklärte Nacht even sounds. Chamber music of this quality doesn’t happen by accident, and it certainly doesn’t happen by assembling famous names and hoping chemistry occurs in the studio. These musicians know each other’s bow arms, know where the breath goes before a phrase turns. Utrecht’s chamber festival gets the credit, I suspect, though credit is a strange word for something that sounds this much like pleasure.

Schoenberg wrote Verklärte Nacht in 1899, three weeks of white-hot inspiration, before he had met Mathilde Zemlinsky but very much while he wanted to. You can hear the wanting. Richard Dehmel’s poem — a woman confesses to her lover that she carries another man’s child, walking through a cold wood, and somehow by poem’s end the night has gone “transfigured,” luminous, forgiving — gave the young composer license for harmonic daring that the Vienna Tonkünstlerverein found scandalous enough to reject the piece outright in 1899 (an “inverted ninth chord,” the complaint ran, as if chords had never been inverted before). Mahler defended him. History has vindicated the scandal into repertory staple, though mostly in the string-orchestra garb Schoenberg himself arranged in 1917 and revised in 1943. That version has lushness on its side. This one, the original sextet, has something better: clarity of argument, six individual voices in dramatic exchange rather than massed sentiment.

And here’s where this performance earns its place. Jansen leads without dominating — her tone bright, almost silvery at the top, but she steps back the instant the musical argument calls for it, which in this score is often. Listen to the passage where the woman’s confession unfolds, around the work’s center: the violas (Maxim Rysanov and Amihai Grosz) carry a weight and darkness that never curdles into murk, and the cellos — Torleif Thedéen, Jens Peter Maintz — dig into the bass lines with a rosiny grain you can practically smell. The engineering helps enormously here. Decca has given each instrument real presence without resorting to spotlighting; you hear six distinct timbres occupying real air, not a blended mush with Jansen’s violin riding on top.

Compare the classic 1986 Sony album, Juilliard Quartet with Yo-Yo Ma and Walter Trampler — a performance I grew up with and still respect, but the vibrato has a wobble to it now that time hasn’t been kind to, and there are stretches where the ensemble goes soft-focus when the music wants sinew. The Brandis Quartet’s Nimbus account has grit and conviction to spare, real intensity, though it trades away some of the light-and-shade this new version finds so naturally. The Talich on Calliope I’d set aside — pretty in patches, but the intonation wanders in ways that undercut the hushed passages where everything depends on pitch being dead true. None of them, to my ear, balances Schoenberg’s late-Romantic chromatic saturation against his essentially classical formal logic — this is, after all, a tone poem squeezed into something like sonata architecture — as persuasively as Jansen and company do.

Then Schubert. The pairing makes sense on paper — both works are quintets or quasi-quintets born from erotic and mortal urgency, both stretch chamber form toward symphonic weight — but the String Quintet in C major demands an entirely different sound world, and this ensemble knows it. Where the Schoenberg is harmonic vertigo, the Schubert is spaciousness, those long paragraphs unfolding with the patience of a man who, dying, had stopped being in a hurry about anything except getting the piece down on paper. Written in his final weeks of life, 1828, the quintet uses two cellos rather than the Mozartian two violas, and that second cello — Maintz here, playing with Thedéen — opens up a bass register of extraordinary richness, nowhere more than in the slow movement, that great E major island of suspended time where the first cello sings its long melody over pizzicato accompaniment and you forget, for a few minutes, that the composer writing this had perhaps weeks left.

The reading here breathes beautifully — tempos unhurried but never slack, the second movement’s stormy middle section erupting with real violence before subsiding back into its trance. The finale has dance-rhythm lift without rushing, Hungarian inflections given their due without caricature. I’ll confess a slight preference, in the first movement’s development, for a touch more mystery in the hushed transitional passages — some versions (I think of the old Casals Festival performances, imperfect as they are in other ways) find an even eerier stillness. But this is a quibble against playing of consistent intelligence and unfailing beauty of sound.

Eighty-three minutes of first-rate chamber music, superbly engineered, with playing that sounds lived-in rather than merely assembled. Essential listening — not just for Jansen’s considerable following, but for anyone who wants to hear what these two very different meditations on love and transfiguration can do when put in the hands of musicians this attuned to one another.