Brahms-Glanert - Four Serious Songs, etc

The Guardian 100

Nagy/Kriikku/Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra/Elts
(Ondine)

Detlev Glanert’s affinity with Brahms crystallised to extraordinary effect in his masterly 2005 version of the great composer’s Four Serious Songs. Part composer, part curator, Glanert frames the songs with four preludes and a postlude to create one continuous score that brilliantly intensifies the impact of the original work. Brahms’s vocal lines are given a powerful, burnished-sounding performance here by baritone Michael Nagy. Glanert’s orchestration is dark, intriguing and entirely idiomatic; even during the interludes, when Brahms’s voice yields to Glanert’s own, the music feels somehow more Brahmsian than Luciano Berio’s skilful but more straightforward soloist-and-orchestra arrangement of the Clarinet Sonata No 1, brightly played here by Kari Kriikku. In between comes Glanert’s Weites Land, which takes the first notes of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony as the starting point for an edgy, whirling orchestral fantasy. Conducted by Olari Elts, the Helsinki Philharmonic packs a sense of epic scale into its 11 minutes.