Wolfgang Rihm: Jakob Lenz

Jakob Lenz is a deeply absorbing music drama that is not meant as entertainment. If you are a listener who finds Wozzeck too emotionally draining, I would recommend staying away. But if you are... — Fanfare, May/June 2020 More…

Release Date: 28th Jun 2019
Catalogue No: ALPHA717
Label: Alpha

Diapason d’Or

September 2019

Vidéo
International Classical Music Awards

2019

Nominee - Video Performance

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Rihm: Jakob Lenz

Georg Nigl, Henry Waddington, John Graham-Hall
La Monnaie Symphony Orchestra
Franck Ollu, Andrea Breth (director)

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‘I want to move and be moved. Everything about music is moving’; these are the words in which Wolfgang Rihm once stated his musical credo. His chamber opera Jakob Lenz has in the meantime become one of the most frequently performed works in the 20th century German opera repertoire. Based on Georg Büchner’s novella about the poet Jakob Lenz’s unavoidable decline into madness, Wolfgang Rihm builds a highly charged atmosphere that leads us compellingly to a dramatic denouement. As a result of the wealth of musical styles – ranging from spoken text through Sprechgesang and recitative to fully elaborated coloratura – and of harmonic techniques – atonality, widened tonality and pure tonality – this work is sometimes compared to Berg’s Wozzeck. After Kát’a Kabanová and La Traviata, Andrea Breth is returning to La Monnaie for a radical interpretation of this deeply moving work. After a first recording published by Alpha, dedicated to the Bach family, Georg Nigl is amazing in the main role.

Reviews

May/June 2020

Jakob Lenz is a deeply absorbing music drama that is not meant as entertainment. If you are a listener who finds Wozzeck too emotionally draining, I would recommend staying away. But if you are open to the kind of searing experience that a great performance of Wozzeck can offer, this opera is for you

October 2019

Things get very messy (this is not a piece for weak stomachs)…Georg Nigl presents a rounded and intensely sympathetic portrait of Lenz…Directed with assurance by Franck Ollu, the 12-strong band includes a harpsichord and three cellos but no upper strings.

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Wolfgang Rihm: Jakob Lenz

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