Dramatic cantata

Mario Venzago knows Othmar Schoeck's music like no other. He has made integral recordings of his choral works with the MDR Choir and Symphony Orchestra, and the CDs with the operas Venus and Penthesilea were awarded the highest honors. In May last year, the concert performance of the opera Dürande Castle with a new libretto in Bern, an elaborate large-scale production. The live recording has also recently been released (Claves CD 1902-04).

In its concert programs last season, the Musikkollegium Winterthur commemorated the patronage of Werner Reinhart (1884-1951), who also strongly supported Othmar Schoeck. The Dramatic Cantata From the fisherman and his wife was written by Schoeck in close contact with Reinhart, and he even composed part of it at Reinhart's vacation home on the "Fluh" in Maur on Lake Greifensee. The work was premiered on October 3, 1930 at the Saxon State Opera in Dresden.

Venzago puts the first digital recording of this work in which the composer sets the fairy tale of the power-hungry fisherman's wife from the Brothers Grimm collection to music. Venzago sticks to the Low German version by Philipp Otto Runge, which Schoeck had originally chosen. The peculiar spelling of the title refers to this. And indeed, the Low German lends the piece a more folksy, even archaic note.

Schoeck himself thought that his Dramatic Cantata could also be performed well in concert, as it was important to him to present the dramatic escalation of the increasingly greedy woman in the music as "variations and fugue on an 'ancient' theme". Venzago and the Musikkollegium Winterthur succeed in repeatedly breaking up the lyrical orchestral parts with dramatic verve and seductively playing out the charms of the instrumentation.

In the increasingly complex variations, the orchestra illustrates the increasingly brazen wishes that the fisherman makes to the butt in the sea and which are also fulfilled. The result is a colorful, shimmering, internalized intensity that carries the singers atmospherically. Rachel Harnisch as Fru is able to expressively shape the oscillation between lyrical singing and virtuosically exalted intervallic leaps.

Jörg Dürmüller is also very sensitive as the increasingly desperate Fisherman, singing his tenor role with many shades and colors. In contrast, Jordan Shanahan sings Butt's short, mighty bass calls from the depths of the sea with majestic grandeur. All in all, a musically appealing, committed interpretation of Schoeck, à la Venzago.