Review

In 1977, composer George Perle examined the annotated printed score of the Lyric Suite that Alban Berg presented to Hannah Fuchs-Robettin. Berg’s adulterous affair with her had provided the Suite’s encoded program. Berg had appended Stefan George’s translation of Baudelaire’s De profundis clamavi to the final movement in her score. Nothing suggests that Berg ever intended this text to be sung, yet it has since been incorporated, musically, into several performances and recordings, notably by Dawn Upshaw (Nonesuch 79696-2) and Marie-Nicole Lemieux (Naive V 5240).

In her own brief contribution to this “alternative” movement, superstar soprano Renée Fleming adds some emotional warmth following the Emerson’s robust traversal of the Lyric Suite’s erotically charged music.

Even more satisfying is their performance of Sonette der Elisabeth Barrett-Browning by Egon Wellesz who, like Berg, was born in 1885 and studied with Schoenberg. Wellesz’s rarely heard, expressive and expressionistic settings of five sonnets in translations by Rainer Maria Rilke, draw plenty of passion and intensity from Fleming and the Emerson.

Closing the CD is Eric Zeisl’s pleasant but unmemorable setting of Komm süsser Tod, enhanced by Fleming’s lush, lustrous voice. Zeisl (1905-1959), a Jew, fled his native Austria in 1938, and wound up composing film scores and concert works in Hollywood.

This CD will appeal to those interested in little-known but rewarding 20th-century repertoire (the Wellesz) and, of course, to Renée Fleming’s justifiably innumerable fans (including me).