Over time, I have come to truly cherish Mahler’s KINDERTOTENLIEDER. I’ve recently discovered an arrangement by Andreas N. Tarkmann that I especially like: played by musicians of the WDR Symphony Orchestra and sung by Sara Gouzy (photo above).
The live recording dates from January 2024. Watch and listen here.
Bass-baritone Donald Bell (above) sings Walton’s BELSHAZZAR’S FEAST with the Netherlands Radio Choir and the Radio Chamber Orchestra, broadcast live from the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam in December of 1965. Hugo Rignold conducts.
Listen here.
(This article appeared on Oberon’s Grove in 2009, following Ms. Behrens’ death at the age of 72.)
“It is so difficult for me to comprehend that Hildegard Behrens has died. She was only 72 and it seems not all that long ago that my friend Bryan and I visited her in her dressing room after what was to be her penultimate Met performance: as Marie in Berg’s WOZZECK.
Hildegard Behrens was one of a half-dozen singers who, in the nearly half-century that I’ve been immersed in the world of opera, made an impression that transcended mere vocalism and acting. Her voice was utterly her own: a ravaged, astringent quality often beset her timbre – the price of having given so unsparingly of her instrument in some of opera’s most taxing roles. And yet she could produce phrases of stupendously haunting beauty, and she could suddenly pull a piano phrase out of mid-air. Her unique mixture of raw steely power, unmatched personal intensity and a deep vein of feminine vulnerability made her performances unforgettable even when the actual sound of the voice was less than ingratiating.
So many memories are flooding back this morning while I am thinking about her: the Wesendonck Lieder she sang at Tanglewood during my ‘Wagner summer’…a rare chance to hear her miscast but oddly moving singing of the Verdi REQUIEM…her televised RING Cycle from the Met…her wildly extravagant ‘mad scene’ in Mozart’s IDOMENEO…her passionate Tosca and Santuzza, cast against the vocal norm…a solo recital at Carnegie Hall…the dress rehearsal of the Met revival of her ELEKTRA where she made up (and how!) for an off-night at the premiere. Hildegard Behrens was also the holder of the Lotte Lehmann Ring, which was left to her by her great colleague Leonie Rysanek upon Rysanek’s untimely death in 1998.
It was in fact the Behrens Elektra, sung in concert at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Seiji Ozawa in August 1988 that has always seemed to me the very epitome of what an operatic portrayal can be. In a black gown and violently teased hair, the soprano (announced as being indisposed by allergies) transformed a stand-and-deliver setting into a full-scale assault on the emotions. I’ll never forget that performance and I was fortunate a week later to record it from a delayed broadcast.
In the great scene in which Elektra recognizes her long-lost brother, Behrens transported me right out of this mortal world. Here it is, from her 1994 Met performance with Donald McIntyre.
It’s going to be hard for me now to listen to Hildegard – her Berlioz Nuits d’Ete is my favorite recording of those beloved songs, unconventional as her voice sounds in that music – or to watch her on film as Brunnhilde or Elektra. For a while I will just let the memories play.”
Above: Ms. Behrens as Tosca
Above: the soprano in concert with Daniel Barenboim
Author: Lili Tobias
On Thursday, August 21st, 2025, I headed back to the DiMenna Center for my second concert of the week to see another performance that was part of the Time:Spans Festival. On the program was the world premiere of False Division, a collaboration between Endlings (Raven Chacon and John Dieterich) and Yarn/Wire (Laura Barger, Julia Den Boer, Russell Greenberg, and Bill Solomon), which created an emotional experience entirely different from Tuesday’s concert. While Chaya Czernowin’s the divine thawing of the core was powerfully haunting, False Division ultimately maintained a sense of underlying safety amidst the chaotic banquet of noise.
The music began with glowing bell tones in the percussion and electronics, reminding me of fireflies or droplets of water on a summer night. Everything that followed was incredibly different though! While I wasn’t a fan of each and every sound in the piece (such as the nails-on-a-chalkboard sound of bowing a block of styrofoam), each one was an experience of some sort, and many sounds were completely new to me (like the rumbling of a massage gun on the surface of a bass drum). There were often quick shifts between sections with very different sound profiles, each one with its own unique character.
False Division celebrated the joy of musical exploration and experimentation. I had really great seat, with a direct line of sight towards one of the elaborate percussion setups, so I could not only hear everything, but also see the process of how those sounds were brought to life. One of my favorite moments of the piece was when the percussionist nearest to me ecstatically bowed a cymbal resting on a drum until nearly half the bow hairs had frayed and split—and he did all this with a mallet held between his teeth!
I could tell all the musicians were having a ton of fun, and this fun continued through the duration of the performance. To kick off the “grand finale,” the keyboardist pulled out a twirly noisemaker, and, spinning it around above her head, made her way over to the piano bench to join the pianist for a lively 4-hand explosion of notes. Even as just an audience member, I could feel the joy of making music together, and I left the concert hall far more lighthearted than I did on Tuesday. Both nights were filled with incredibly inspiring music, and it’s always good to have variety at a long festival like this!
~ Lili Tobias
Above: composer Chaya Czernowin, photo by Astrid Ackerman
~ Author: Lili Tobias
Tuesday August 19th, 2025 – This evening, the Talea Ensemble, with Claire Chase on solo contrabass flute, performed the US premiere of Chaya Czernowin’s the divine thawing of the core at the DiMenna Center. The concert was part of the Time:Spans Festival, and the musicians delivered a stunning performance to a nearly full house!
Breathing played a prevalent role in the sound world of the divine thawing of the core. The unusual collection of instruments in the ensemble, which included six flutes, six oboes, and six trumpets, leaned heavily on the winds, which were truly “windy” to the greatest extent. It was as if the musicians made up a collective weather system, at times calm and at others, stormy. The music began with a plaintive, single-note call-and-response structure between Claire Chase on the contrabass flute and the other sections of instruments. Tranquil, but at the same time eerily apprehensive and ill at ease.
Above: Claire Chase (rehearsal photo)
Further on in the piece, the storm broke: the winds and brass howling and screaming, the notes swirling behind the frantic trills of the contrabass flute. Chase displayed incredible breath control when the music got chaotic. Although it seemed at first as though she was struggling for breath with sharp uptakes of air, I could ultimately tell that this effect was deliberate. The breath in was just as important as the breath out, as it added an extra layer of humanity to the music that can be difficult to achieve with a non-vocal ensemble.
From the first few delicate tones to the turmoil of a “demonic waltz,” Czernowin’s music continually circled around exact pitches, rarely landing solidly on a frequency. The winds bent the notes, wavering and unstable, while the cellos bowed deep into the strings, producing rumbly low sounds. Even the piano, when it first entered the soundscape, provided key strikes that oscillated up and down in their decay.
And together as an ensemble too, the musicians often behaved as one entity emitting and ever-shifting collection of sound. The addition and subtraction of tones from the cumulative voice of the ensemble created a brand new form of pitch variance, and this perpetual suggestion—but never clarification—of pitch kept me attuned to every tiny transformation.
Suddenly though, all airflow was cut off, and just the breathing of the audience was left in the hall. After a moment of silence, applause erupted through the rows of seats and lasted for a good 5 minutes!
The musicians of the Talea Ensemble:
Laura Cocks, Flute
Yoshi Weinberg, Flute
Isabel Lepanto Gleicher, Flute
Catherine Boyack, Flute
Amir Farsi, Flute
Michael Matsuno, Flute
Michelle Farah, Oboe
Stuart Breczinksi, Oboe
Christa Robinson, Oboe
Jeffrey Reinhardt, Oboe
Karen Birch Blundell, Oboe
Mekhi Gladden, Oboe
Sam Jones, Trumpet
Jerome Burns, Trumpet
ChangHyun Cha, Trumpet
Alejandro López-Samamé, Trumpet
Atse Theodros, Trumpet
Robert Garrison, Trumpet
Mike Lormand, Trombone
Dan Peck, Tuba
Margaret Kampmeier, Piano
Sae Hashimoto, Percussion
Chris Gross, Cello
Brian Snow, Cello
Thapelo Masita, Cello
Conductor: James Baker
~ Lili Tobias
A rare document: the great Bulgarian soprano Raina Kabaivanska singing Turandot’s “In questa reggia” at a concert given at Viareggio in 1978. As far as I know, she never performed the entire role during her long career (though she was an admirable Liu), nor can I find any mention of her singing Turandot’s narrative/aria anywhere else.
Watch and listen here.
A performance of Philip Glass’s String Quartet #3 by Le Quatuor Tana, from a concert given in June 2019. The players are Antoine Maisonhaute and Ivan Lebrun (violins), Olivier Marin (viola), and Jeanne Maisonhaute (cello).
Watch and listen here.
The Hungarian mezzo-soprano Maria von Ilosvay won the 1937 International Singing Contest at Vienna. Thereafter she joined a touring opera company for two years – even traveling to America, in performances organized by Sol Hurok – before joining the Hamburg Opera in 1940. She sang at Vienna, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Salzburg,
Ms. von Ilosvay participated in the first post-war Bayreuth Festivals. In her book New Bayreuth, Penelope Turing writes with admiration of the mezzo in such RING Cycle roles as Erda, Waltraute, and the First Norn.
At the Salzburg Festival, Ms. von Ilosvay took part in the first staged performance of LE VIN HERBE by Frank Martin in 1948, and in the premiere of Carl Orf’f”s ANTIGONAE in 1949. With the ensemble of the Hamburg Staatsoper, she was a guest at the Edinburgh Festival, and in 1956 sang Jocasta in Stravinsky’s OEDIPUS REX at the Holland Festival. Also in 1956, she appeared as a guest artist at London’s Royal Opera House.
In 1967, Maria von Ilosvay sang Marcellina in a filmed German-language ‘studio’ performance of Mozart’s NOZZE DI FIGARO. Her scene with the brilliant Susanna of Edith Mathis is a delight.
Ms. von Ilosvay recorded the role of Erda twice, and was the mezzo-soprano soloist on a recording of the Verdi REQUIEM with the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. She is also The Mother on Herbert von Karajan’s recording of HANSEL UND GRETEL. She did a great deal of concert work, and was a noted recitalist.
Maria von Ilosvay passed away at Hamburg in 1987.
Peter Mattei sing’s Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder at a 2021 concert given by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Fabio Luisi.
Filmed during the pandemic; the orchestral soloists are particularly fine.
Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (song settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert), in an arrangement by Andreas N. Tarkmann, Musicians of the WDR Symphony Orchestra accompany singer Sara Gouzy (photo above), from a concert given in 2024.
Watch and listen here.
Oberon's Glade 