Hoooooo-boy. I bought this download just because, but man, now I'm kicking myself for not buying it earlier. I've got several versions, including by some big-name conductors - Boulez, Kubelik, Sinopoli, and my heretofore fave Rattle - but Salonen just sort of laps them. I always equate Salonen the conductor with precise, clear direction, and I primarily associate him with more modern music, where he excels. (That written, his Mahler 3 is monumentally great, and his Bruckner 4 ain't none too shabby.) He brings the precision and clarity, but he adds intensity, vitality, and
theatricality to this live recording. When he needs to deliver lush beauty, he can, but when he needs to ramp up the tension and power, he delivers and then some. All throughout the much swifter sounding than the timing suggests performance, he will back the singer perfectly, and then rip through tuttis with abandon. This more than his recording of Ligeti's
Le Grand Macabre shows off his operatic bona fides. Also all throughout, I hear the influence of Wagner more clearly than normal, and multiple operas make their influence known - whiffs of
Tristan,
Meistersinger,
Gotterdammerung can be heard - and Strauss is in there, too. Clearly, Salonen should write his own opera and then conduct it, but surely an
Elektra can be delivered. And a
Ring. I know he was going to lead one, but it got cancelled. That must be rectified ASAP.
There are nits to pick. The sound can be too congested in the loudest passages, some choral singing, while off the charts in excitement and tautness, may not be the clearest, and maybe some of the singers sound less than pristinely perfect at times. But this is a live recording, so that doesn't matter.
I have not been this jazzed about a Schoenberg recording since picking up the Diotima’s recording of the quartets and before that probably Kent Nagano’s mind-numbingly great recording of
Die Jakobsleiter. This recording is just all kinds of ass kicking great. A late year purchase of the year, I tell you what.