Mahler Das klagende Lied and Berg Lulu-Suite – Boulez

Nobody ever accused Pierre Boulez of sentimentality, and there is not a stray tear anywhere in this Salzburg document — which is, depending on your temperament, either the whole point or the whole problem.

Boulez conducted the opening concert of the 2011 Salzburg Festival with an ensemble of formidable pedigree, and DG has done the sensible thing in preserving it. The pairing itself deserves a small ovation. Berg heard the 1901 premiere of Das klagende Lied and never really got over it — the encounter reoriented his whole sense of what modern music might do, and you can hear the DNA of that youthful conversion humming under the Lulu-Suite’s more astringent surfaces. Putting the two works on one disc is not mere marketing cleverness. It is musicology with ears.

Here is the catch, though, and it is not a small one: Boulez gives us only two of the cantata’s three parts. “Waldmärchen,” the forest legend that actually explains why anyone is being murdered in these woods in the first place, is missing. Mahler wrote it, revised it, ultimately excised it himself for the 1899 publication — so Boulez has history and the composer’s own second thoughts on his side. Fair enough. But dramatically, starting with “Der Spielmann” is a bit like walking into Act II of a play and being told to sort out the plot from the scenery. We get the minstrel discovering the bone, carving his fatal flute, without ever having met the two brothers or watched the murder happen among the flowers. I recently sat with a 1981 Rozhdestvensky performance that restores the full triptych, sprawl and all, and something in me still prefers the untidy completeness of Mahler’s original conception to this trim, efficient torso.

That said — the playing. My God, the playing.

Boulez’s Mahler has always divided listeners who want wallowing and those who want structure laid bare like a skeleton under X-ray, and this is very much a skeleton reading: lean, transparent, every inner voice audible, climaxes arrived at rather than wept toward. The brass in “Der Spielmann” cut with a cleanliness that Bruno Walter would have found bloodless and that I found bracing. Anna Larsson’s contralto has weight and a slightly covered, ashen color that suits the tale’s morbidity — she sounds like she’s narrating a crime she witnessed and cannot quite forgive herself for surviving. Dorothea Röschmann brings an almost startling vividness to her lines, bright top notes cutting through Mahler’s already dense orchestration without strain. This is a interpretation that trusts the score’s own bones instead of adding upholstery.

The Lulu-Suite fares even better, frankly, and here Anna Prohaska joins the cast for the Lied der Lulu, singing with a chilled, glittering poise that never once begs for sympathy — which is exactly right for Berg’s amoral heroine. Boulez’s way with Berg’s twelve-tone lyricism has been definitive for decades; he conducted the belated 1979 premiere of the complete three-act Lulu in Paris, after all, and few conductors alive understand better how Berg’s rows can sing like Puccini while behaving like Schoenberg. The Adagio here has an eerie, glassy sheen — strings kept on a tight vibrato leash, the saxophone solo insinuating rather than crooning. It is gorgeous in the way a well-lit autopsy is gorgeous: everything visible, nothing sentimentalized, and somehow more disturbing for the clarity.

Engineering from the Grosses Festspielhaus captures hall bloom without murk — you get depth without the swimmy blur that live Salzburg recordings sometimes suffer.

So: a disc of real intellectual interest, beautifully played, occasionally maddening in its editorial choices. Completists will want Rozhdestvensky’s fuller Klagende Lied alongside this one. But for sheer instrumental address, and for that startling Berg, Boulez’s Salzburg evening earns its place on the shelf — even shorn of its opening chapter.