Webern - Vocal and Orchestral Works

**** Webern: Vocal and Orchestral Works (Naxos)
Verdict: Webern's diamonds glimmer and shine undimmed by too many decades of apathy

Listen to the first track of Naxos' latest Webern collection and, for just a few notes, you might think you are back in the Baroque - until the familiar melody from Bach's Musical Offering starts zig-zagging from instrument to instrument.

The Austrian composer's 1935 orchestral transcription of Bach's supreme fugal feat is a feat in itself, as the many threads of orchestral colour pursue their journeys in what amounts to an impressive piece of musical tapestry.

The very able musicians of the Twentieth Century Music Ensemble meet again later on the disc for the 1941 Variations. For all the jagged dissonances and dramatic disruptions, Bach's shadow also seems to linger here; perhaps conductor Robert Craft is keen that we make the connection between this and the earlier transcription.

In this particularly translucent Abbey Road recording, it seems that every player in this work is a soloist and some of us will remember celesta player Stephen Gosling touring New Zealand a few years back as a piano soloist, playing John Psathas.

Webern is emphatically not to be feared. It is hard to believe that this man is the hard-line serialist so vilified on his centenary by the British writer Bernard Levin. The fleeting watercolours of the Opus 10 Orchestral Pieces are no more daunting than Debussy. Listening to the finessed filigree of the fourth, clustered around a lingering mandolin line, one marvels that Craft has drawn such delicacy from the Philharmonia Orchestra.

The rest of the album is vocal and, from her first arching phrase, Toni Arnold sings Webern's 1910 Rilke settings as if they are part of a Straussian twilight.

Bass David Wilson-Johnson and soprano Claire Booth do the same with the Hildegard Jone texts of the Second Cantata, but Naxos does the listener no service by not providing texts and translations to complement Craft's extensive liner notes.

One's appreciation of Wilson-Johnson's "Sehr tief verhalten innerst Leben" is so much enhanced when one realises how skilfully the bass catches the poet's slightly fey description of an inner life buzzing with contentment like the happiest of beehives. Craft's programme note talks of technicalities but these musicians offer so much more.