“The fewer men, the greater share of honour,” Florian Boesch said, quoting Henry V as a comment on the smallish audience before him. Currently the Wigmore’s artist in residence, the Austrian baritone and his pianist Roger Vignoles had decided to give an introductory talk before “having a go,” as Vignoles put it, at the single work on the programme, Ernst Krenek’s seldom-performed Reisebuch aus dem Österreichischen Alpen.
Viennese by birth, Krenek (1900-1991) was an important and successful modernist in the German-speaking world until the Nazis banned his work as “degenerate,” forcing him into a still productive, though comparatively obscure exile in the US. The Reisebuch was written, text as well as music, in 20 days in 1929, and forms a personal, at times hard-hitting meditation on the state of interwar Europe.
The remains of the Austrian empire have become a dispiriting tourist trap, while a “bloody clown” (Hitler) threatens from a distance. Existential rootlessness is offset by absurdist humour. Though Krenek used serial techniques elsewhere, the score is determinedly tonal, and pays self-conscious homage to Schubert. But jarring dissonance sometimes takes us into territory far beyond anything his contemporaries exploring at the time.
Rather than just “having a go,” meanwhile, the performance was a tour de force. Boesch has the ability to inhabit everything he sings, and this felt very up close and personal. Krenek’s vocal lines are rooted in speech patterns, and what started out as a chatty monologue gradually veered towards a mordantly funny harangue in which superficialities were stripped away, until all that remained was the suggestion that our only response to the messy uncertainties of life is to smile at them. Vignoles’ playing, lyrical and brittle by turns, underpinned every emotional and intellectual twist. A remarkable work, exceptionally done, and absolutely unforgettable.
