Markus Stenz’s recording of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, taken from his final concerts as the Gürzenich Orchestra’s music director, appeared last month on Hyperion. These studio recordings of Schoenberg’s first orchestral work, the symphonic poem Pelleas und Melisande and the Violin Concerto, the first he completed after emigrating to the US, underline Stenz’s credential as a conductor of the Second Viennese School. He’s equally at home in the romantic sweep of Pelleas as he is in the much more ambiguous world of the concerto, with its tensions between tradition and innovation, serialism and tonality, while never allowing the former to become too indulgent nor the latter to seem too dry and calculated. Kolja Blacher’s account of the solo part in the concerto doesn’t quite have the same intensity as Hilary Hahn generates on her Sony recording with Esa‑Pekka Salonen, just as Stenz’s account of Pelleas isn’t quite as luxuriant as Herbert von Karajan’s famous Deutsche Grammophon recording, but together the two works make an attractive package.
