This version of Arnold Schönberg's great monodrama Erwartung has something of the miraculous about it. It is quite rare that performers get quite this invested in a performance. A powerful one-act opera, Schönberg's work, an expressionist masterpiece and an illustration of late German romanticism, benefits here from a hallucinatory treatment, bathed in a thundering dramatism. The American diva sets her – apparently limitless – vocal powers to work on this especially poignant work. It tells the story of a woman wandering in a forest by moonlight, looking for her lover who has failed to come home, and could possibly be deceiving her. She is afraid, she is jealous, and the story has to be understood through these ephemeral feelings of hers. She suddenly falls across a heavy object in the dark. Is it his body? Is he dead? Has she killed him? Bit by bit, she falls into madness, and suddenly remembers her crime.
Jessye Norman meets her match in the form of partner James Levine. Note that these two artists performed this opera on the stage of the New York Metropolitan Opera several times before this now-legendary 1993 recording was made. Both players carry this work to a paroxysm of expression.
It's an unexpected, but welcome, pairing, with cabaret songs arranged by Schönberg. With Jessye Norman and with James Levine at the piano, here they take on accents which are at once folksy, sexy, and elegant. This record shines like a black diamond among the legends of recorded music. © François Hudry/Qobuz