The BBC National Orchestra of Wales is appearing in six Proms at the Albert Hall this summer, and in the first of them the orchestra’s principal conductor, Ryan Bancroft, reunited two works that received their premieres in the same concert in Vienna in 1905, at that moment in music history when late romanticism was on the point of tipping over into modernism.
Both Schoenberg’s Pelleas and Melisande, based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck that was also the source of Debussy’s opera and inspired incidental music from both Fauré and Sibelius, and Alexander von Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau, after Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Little Mermaid, are symphonic poems, broadly following the model of Richard Strauss’s early examples. The Schoenberg is a single-movement work, requiring a huge orchestra (quadruple woodwind, nine horns) while the forces required for the Zemlinsky, which he called a “symphonic fantasy” in three movements, are almost as massive.
The two works are of almost equal length, around 40 minutes, and both are knitted together by collections of leitmotifs, but as Bancroft and his orchestra showed so vividly, in performance they leave rather different impressions. Where Schoenberg’s individuality is stamped on every bar of Pelleas, in the cast of its thematic material and the sweet-sour tang of its harmonies, the Zemlinsky, for all its incidental beauties, seems much more derivative. There are passing allusions to Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, and inevitably to Strauss, and the vein of sentimentality that runs through the score is very Straussian too. If Pelleas comes across as the work of a young composer who is determined he is going to have his say on the future course of music, then Die Seejungfrau suggests the work of someone who is already struggling to keep up as music moves on.
But BBCNOW’s rich, full blooded performances certainly did justice to both scores. If Bancroft could do little about the episodic character of the Zemlinsky, except to make sure everything was crisply characterised, the orchestral playing in Pelleas provided a reminder that Schoenberg’s scoring could be just as vivid as that of Strauss without the self-aggrandising, even though he would never compose anything quite like Pelleas again.
• Available on BBC Sounds. The BBC Proms continue until 14 September.
