Simone Young conducts Sydney Symphony in its first Gurre-Lieder

“An orgiastic orchestral sound”: Simone Young’s own description of this work sums up the sheer size of the 140-strong orchestra and 285 choristers that were required to achieve Schoenberg’s stupendous, hyper-Romantic Gurre-Lieder for its first ever performance by the Sydney Symphony. A first too for Young, as she was appointed International Ambassador for this Schoenberg 150 year. And a first for the restructured Sydney Opera House Concert Hall, which lost ten rows of stalls seating, but proved that its new acoustic can handle such dynamic forces.

But these forces require a dynamic maestro to manage them and Young conjured both magical pianissimi and a transparency that allowed the quadrupled harps and piccolos to shine through, while the walls of sound from both the extended brass and the 12-part male chorus thrilled the audience to its core.

Fortunately, the soloists also thrilled: New Zealand Heldentenor Simon O’Neill (King Waldemar) and German soprano Ricarda Merbeth (as his mistress Tove) managing to share the eroticism of Jens Peter Jacobsen’s almost surreal verse with resolute voices, even as they stood apart to sing their nine solo stanzas, so often seeming to suggest that eroticism would lead to the deaths that were both their fates. 

Just as their Tristan und Isolde-like passion was shared despite this separation, so Tove’s death (at the hands of Waldemar’s unseen wife) is announced by a great orchestral crash and the boldest of singing by Australian mezzo Deborah Humble, who also gave her Wood Dove immeasurable calm.

Waldemar’s fate is sealed as he curses God for allowing his love to be killed, before adding to the Almighty, “You need a jester”... which we soon got in the powerful voice of tenor Andrew Goodwin in Lieder mode, accompanied by contrabassoon and some quirky orchestration. Waldemar’s clown is there to complain about the nightly Wild Hunt, which the king and his retainers have risen from their graves to undertake in a vain search for Tove. There was nothing skeletal though about the male chorus nor their hunting music.

At which point Schoenberg offers hints of his Pierrot Lunaire to come with extraordinary demands upon a Speaker – Wagnerian baritone Warwick Fyfe performing a manic Sprechstimme. As Young describes this in the program, “It’s like the whole of Wozzeck in five minutes”.

Having taken us through Ravel in the opening nocturne, thrown in inevitable tributes to Wagner and Mahler along the way, Schoenberg's music gives me an almost Elgarian sense of opulence in the final, glorious sunrise – nature having finally rebalanced in the penultimate Summer Wind's Wild Hunt.

Am I being carried away by the dramatic and emotional weight of this performance to wonder whether Waldemar and Tove’s “purple rain of ardent kisses” just might have inspired pop maestro Prince’s most successful album, Purple Rain? It does after all include the track, When Doves Cry!