Jörg Widmann, Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg, Kent Nagano

Jörg Widmann's Arche is an oratorio for soloists, choirs, organ and orchestra, written in 2016 for the opening of the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. This two-disc set is the concert recording of its premiere on 13 January 2017, with Kent Nagano conducting the Philharmonisches Staatsorchester Hamburg. Widmann took his cue from the building, which looks like a ship from outside and reminded him of the hold of an ark from within. In five long movements the work travels through the history of mankind, from the Creation to a closing plea for peace.

Almost three hundred performers took part. The soloists are soprano Marlis Petersen and baritone Thomas E. Bauer, with Iveta Apkalna at the organ, a boy soprano and two child narrators. Three choirs join them: the Chor der Hamburgischen Staatsoper, the Audi Jugendchorakademie and the children of the Hamburger Alsterspatzen. Widmann assembled the libretto himself from texts across many centuries. The Bible and the Latin Mass sit beside Francis of Assisi, Michelangelo, Matthias Claudius, Schiller, Heine, Nietzsche and Peter Sloterdijk. The recording is an NDR production, engineered by Tonmeister Hans-Michael Kissing and licensed to ECM.

The first disc holds Fiat Lux / Es werde Licht, Sintflut and Die Liebe, the second Dies irae and Dona nobis pacem. The child narrators tell the biblical stories plainly and often puncture them with irony. In Sintflut, the longest movement at 29 minutes, a chorale breaks down into a chaotic scream before a baritone aria. Die Liebe is a long love duet for Petersen and Bauer. Dies irae moves through echoes of Stravinsky, Verdi and Orff toward a climax built on Beethoven. The finale opens with the children shouting about computers and the media, then turns on a canon they begin, which rises to a final hymn. As Dieter Rexroth writes in the liner notes, “Everything happens at once, everything interlocks.”

For Christian Carey in Sequenza 21, the oratorio is “an affecting paean to peace”, and he singled out the climax, in which a children's choir rebukes their parents' generation. Dominy Clements of MusicWeb International found it a large-scale work that “can take a bit of getting used to”, yet familiar enough to draw the listener in at first hearing. In Fono Forum, Dirk Wieschollek stressed its wide-ranging polystylism, steeped in the Romantic mass, oratorio and orchestral song.

Two CDs on ECM New Series, catalogue number ECM New Series 2605/06, released in October 2018, with a booklet including Rexroth's essay.