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Schreker’s Birthday of the Infanta in Liverpool, May 22 2008.

Reviewed by Lloyd Moore
posted October 19, 2009

Although now well-represented on CD recordings, the music of Franz Schreker is still a relative rarity in live performances in the UK. So I couldn’t resist making a quick dash up to Merseyside to catch the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under Andrew Davis performing Schreker’s Birthday of the Infanta Suite, in what must be its first performance in this country for many years.

Schreker originally wrote the work in 1908 as a ballet commissioned by the dancers Elsa and Grete Wiesenthal to give as part of the famous ‘Kunstschau’ in Vienna in July of that year. The basis of the story is Oscar Wilde’s novella The Birthday of the Infanta: a young Spanish princess (the Infanta) is given a dwarf as a birthday present. He immediately falls in love with her but is unaware of his physical appearance. Shortly after receiving a present of a white rose from her, he sees himself in a mirror, collapses and dies. It is a story which Alexander Zemlinsky later adapted for his opera Der Zwerg, and which has echoes in Schreker’s own opera Die Gezeichneten. Schreker originally wrote the work for for chamber orchestra, but in 1923 he arranged roughly two-thirds of the original score as a suite for large orchestra for concerts in Holland with the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Willem Mengelberg (to whom the new score was dedicated). In doing so, he composed some new linking passages to ease transitions which were somewhat clumsily handled in the original version and completely omitted the final scene when the Dwarf sees his own reflection (regrettably, in my view, since this section contains some of the most innovative and effective music in the entire work). This second version has been the form in which the music has become generally known, though the original version has recently been published and recorded.

This Liverpool performance of the Suite was exemplary in every way. From the start, Davis adopted a tempo that allowed the decorative, Jugendstil elements to tell and register without sacrificing the primacy of the principal lines. Indeed, tempo relationships throughout were beautifully judged, emphasising the dramatic narrative and giving the score a feeling of over-arching shape rather than a loose succession of dances. Schreker’s scoring is for an expanded orchestra including harps, mandolines, guitars and enough percussion activity to keep eight players busy. Yet the music is generally delicate and graceful and Davis kept these forces on a tight rein, totally avoiding all bombast. I can say without exaggeration that I cannot imagine the work being better played. Davis clearly seems to have taken to it (he has programmed another performance in Frankfurt next year) and the orchestra must have enjoyed the opportunity of presenting such a patently attractive and approachable work to a highly appreciative audience, few of whom, one suspects, had ever heard it before. It is wonderful to see a British orchestra championing Schreker’s music, and presenting it with such conviction.

I cannot resist making mention of the other items in this concert. After the interval, an overwhelming account of Berg’s Three Fragments from ‘Wozzeck’ left me shattered and barely in a fit state to hear Strauss’ Rosenkavalier Suite – which, when it came, was delivered with such style and virtuosic panache that all my reservations about this composer temporarily crumbled away. Quite what an admittedly exceptionally fine performance of Brahms’ Haydn Variations was doing in the middle of all these fin-de-siècle fireworks is anyone’s guess (surely using Orla Boylan, the soprano in the Berg in, say, one of the Mahler song-cycles would have made more sense), but this quibble is a minor one about what was otherwise an outstanding concert, one which will stay with me for some time to come.

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