From Robert Schumann there comes the sentence to be taken to heart: "Honor the old highly, bring, however, also to the new a warm heart." The day before yesterday the theatre Vorpommern has taken the master once more with the word and has invited "curious ears" to a chamber concert in the Pommersches Landesmuseum. There was old and new; there was Schumann himself and a today's contemporary to whom the composer was material and suggestion for completely own and stylistically of course quite different compositional considerations.
With entitled curiosity the program sequence had to do something: at first there was Schumanns Eichendorff-cycle op.39 (Anette Gerhardt, soprano, Prof. GMD Mathias Husmann, piano), then there was as a premiere Alois Bröders purely instrumental Metamorphosen on this opus (five strings, eight winds, piano, harp, percussion), and at the end – a renewed premiere – the joining of both versions, including now additionally ringing out interpolations (insertions, transitions).
Schumann and Bröder – of course there doesn’t lack provoking contrasts: 19-th century there, engaged new compositional methods here. Schumann spoke there for himself, Bröder certainly also, in his first, instrumental version, however, at least for the listener still insufficiently "primed". This changed with the cooperation of all musicians. Fifty minutes of concentrated seamlessness in the sequence of song, purely instrumental and instrumental enriched song seemed to deactivate music-linguistic contrasts and to produce a partly amazingly effective other, new uniformity. Various tricks of the composer who plans his cycle retrograding to the one Schumanns and accented metaphorically in the single episodes in each case only musical single aspects, thus no musical moods, are more difficult to reconstruct, unignorable relations to the original excluded. However, the unorthodox, anyhow remarkable acoustic result had been able to interest obviously many curious ears the day before yesterday. Rightly, because singer, pianist, musicians of our orchestra and the conductor Henning Ehlert provided for a convincing presentation.
E. Ochs
(from: Ostsee-Zeitung, 20.9.2005)