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Music Review

A Struggling Soldier and a Seductive Beauty: Two Tales of Yearning

The conductor Franz Welser-Möst led the Vienna State Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in Berg’s “Wozzeck" on Friday at Carnegie Hall.Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Since making its Carnegie Hall debut in 1956, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra has performed more than 100 concerts there, winning devoted audiences over the years. But this weekend, music lovers in the New York area had rare opportunities to hear this historic player-run ensemble in its other official capacity: the pit band of the Vienna State Opera.

As part of Carnegie Hall’s three-week festival Vienna: City of Dreams, the Vienna State Opera presented concert performances of two seminal early-20th-century works. On Friday, the Austrian conductor Franz Welser-Möst led a wrenchingly beautiful account of Berg’s “Wozzeck”; and on Saturday, the young Latvian conductor Andris Nelsons took the orchestra to the heights of brilliance in a smoldering performance of Strauss’s “Salome.”

Vienna’s history during the Nazi era was explored last week with a three-part symposium at the Paley Center for Media, sponsored by the Chumir Foundation for Ethics in Leadership in partnership with the festival. The second panel on Thursday was particularly pertinent: “How Did the Cultured, Creative Society of Vienna Lose Its Moral Compass: Coming to Terms With a Troubled History.” Clemens Hellsberg, the chairman of the Vienna Philharmonic and a violinist in the orchestra, who in recent years has spearheaded the release of archival documents concerning the orchestra’s complicity with the Nazi regime, read a statement. He said that some “burning questions arise” for the Vienna Philharmonic. The answer, he suggested, is to be found “in the thorough analysis of history” and “in a conscious effort to contribute to shaping a more humane society with the help of the arts.”

Attending that panel affected my perception of the “Wozzeck” performance the following evening. First performed in Berlin in 1925, “Wozzeck” brought fame to the struggling Berg, a Viennese native, and, for a while, good earnings from royalties. Then, in 1933, the Nazis consigned the opera to the waste pile of “degenerate” art and performances were banned. Berg, who died at 50 in 1935, did not live to see the worst of what happened in his country.

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The German soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin singing with searing intensity as the title character in Strauss’s “Salome,” part of the Vienna: City of Dreams festival.Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

Adapted from a play by Georg Büchner, “Wozzeck” tells a bleak, disturbing story set in a garrison town and its environs around 1830. Berg relates the tale with brutal honesty, and this ultimately makes the opera a humane work, a quality conveyed by this grimly expressive performance.

Wozzeck is a delusional, oppressed soldier who lives with Marie, his common-law wife, and their young son. He struggles to supplement his meager military pay by performing menial tasks for a sermonizing captain and offering himself as a subject for the experiments of a crackpot doctor. Berg’s complex, atonal musical language taps into the inner yearnings and agonies of Wozzeck and his frantic, lonely Marie, who lets herself be seduced by a dashing drum major.

The performance brought out the both the tragic horror and ravishing beauty of this pathbreaking work. But the music also emanates from the late-Romantic realm of Mahler, and the orchestra exuded Mahlerian richness, poignancy and turmoil.

Mr. Welser-Möst, the music director of the Cleveland Orchestra, holds a similar post at the Vienna State Opera, so these players know him well. Still, as with the performance he conducted of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in the opening concert of the festival, there were curious moments where the playing seemed unsettled. Mr. Welser-Möst might be overstretched during this festival: He added “Wozzeck” to his busy schedule when Daniele Gatti, who was to have conducted, withdrew because of medical reasons.

Still, there were impressive aspects. After the delirious Wozzeck stabs Marie to death and then drowns in the river searching for the murder weapon, there is an orchestral interlude before the final scene. This interlude is an ingenious musical recapitulation of what has gone before. Mr. Welser-Möst took a stern, hard-driven approach. Yet the orchestra shimmered with penetrating warmth.

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The soprano Evelyn Herlitzius and the baritone Matthias Goerne performing a wrenching account of Berg’s “Wozzeck.”Credit...Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times

The German baritone Matthias Goerne was a poignant and frightening Wozzeck. In the husky, earthy colorings of his singing, you heard the voice of a gruff, powerless soldier and failed family man trying to stay afloat without being overcome by bitterness. During fleeting lyrical passages, Mr. Goerne, a distinguished singer of lieder, inflected Wozzeck’s lines with a touch of dreamy tenderness, almost as if his delusions were poetic fancies. The German soprano Evelyn Herlitzius was a gripping Marie. Her sizable voice at times had a steely edge, even during the somber lullaby Marie sings to her child. Still, this was a moving and vehement Marie, who unleashed cries of despair in fearless top notes.

For this concert opera presentation, the singers were placed to the sides of the orchestra on raised platforms with the members of the excellent Vienna State Opera Chorus in the rear. Other standouts in the cast were Herwig Pecoraro as the Captain, Wolfgang Bankl as the Doctor, Herbert Lippert as the Drum Major and Thomas Ebenstein (substituting for Norbert Ernst, who was ill) as the hail and hearty Andres, Wozzeck’s only friend. Members of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus sang in the short final scene when a group of children in town blithely tell Marie’s young son, who is playing on a hobby horse, that his mother is dead.

Mr. Nelsons, who will take the helm of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in the fall and is just 35, seems to draw the best from every orchestra he works with, including the Vienna Philharmonic for this triumphant “Salome.” Strauss’s score is an irresistible mix of voluptuousness, bristling modern harmony, heaving orchestral intensity and high camp. Mr. Nelsons’s electrifying performance was fresh and intelligent. During the opening scene, Narraboth (the bright tenor Carlos Osuna), a young captain of the guard overcome with awe-struck desire for Salome, incessantly praises her beauty. Mr. Nelsons kept the textures lucid and the mood mysterious. Quirky inner details and fidgety rhythmic figures broke through the sumptuous orchestra sonorities.

As the lurid story unfolded, Mr. Nelsons summoned enveloping swaths of sound and piercing climaxes. Even in moments of chilling ferocity, there was uncanny transparency in the playing. I have never heard a more hypnotic “Dance of the Seven Veils.” Mr. Nelsons paced the music in halting, cagey spurts, suggesting that Salome was a calculating temptress.

As Salome, the German soprano Gun-Brit Barkmin sang with searing power and unflagging intensity. At its best, her voice had a cool, focused allure. But in giving her all, with sudden shifts from unhinged vehemence to restless sensuality, Ms. Barkmin often sang with a very raw sound and shaky pitch. Still, she inhabited this challenging role and won a big ovation from the audience.

The bass-baritone Falk Struckmann, scheduled to sing Jochanaan (John the Baptist), was ill. His replacement, Tomasz Konieczny, was excellent, bringing stentorian power and unusual dignity to this prophet, who pays with his life for resisting Salome’s twisted sexual needs and usually comes off as a pompous fanatic. The veteran American mezzo-soprano Jane Henschel was wonderful as Herodias, Salome’s scheming mother. The husky-voiced German tenor Gerhard A. Siegel was almost endearing as Herod, the tetrarch of Judea, Herodias’s husband, who is nearly undone by his yearning for his stepdaughter.

The Vienna Philharmonic will play three additional programs on March 13, 15 and 16 during Carnegie Hall’s festival Vienna: City of Dreams; 212-247-7800, carnegiehall.org.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Struggling Soldier and Sensual Beauty: Two Tales of Yearning. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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