Othmar Schoeck (1886-1957) is counted among the leading Swiss composers, yet his name has rarely travelled beyond the German-speaking world. Most of his output was vocal, eight operas and some 400 songs, and his late-Romantic idiom fell out of fashion after the Second World War. Notturno Op. 47, written between 1931 and 1933 for baritone and string quartet, is one of his most personal works. Schoeck wrote it in the wake of an unhappy extramarital love affair, and the cycle reads as a confession set at night.
The baritone is Christian Gerhaher, a leading German Lied singer and a former pupil of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who had championed the work. He is joined by the Rosamunde Quartett: Andreas Reiner and Diane Pascal (violins), Helmut Nicolai (viola) and Anja Lechner (cello). The recording was made in December 2007 at the Historischer Reitstadel in Neumarkt, produced by Manfred Eicher with Markus Heiland as engineer. The booklet carries an introduction by Heinz Holliger and an essay by Chris Walton.
The five movements set poems by the 19th-century poet Nikolaus Lenau, and the finale adds a prose fragment by Gottfried Keller. Together they last about 43 minutes, and the proportions are unusual. The first movement, Ruhig, runs for more than seventeen minutes, and the string writing around the voice is dense and searching, while the Presto that follows lasts under three. The closing Rasch und kräftig (quasi Recit.) moves from declamation to Keller's address to the Great Bear constellation, which gives the troubled lover some ground under his feet at the end.
Andrew Clark of the Financial Times heard the work as "Schoeck's dark night of the soul" and praised "the intricacy with which Schoeck intertwines the voices, vocal and instrumental". In BBC Music Magazine, Hilary Finch found Gerhaher "gentler, more intimate and less magisterial than Fischer-Dieskau, but with the same strong and impassioned musical intelligence." The disc received a Diapason d'or and a Pizzicato Supersonic award. Writing in La Folia in 2013, Walt Mundkowsky noted that "the voice goes daringly muted or drained in places, but its outbursts sting."
CD edition, ECM New Series 2061, first released in September 2009.
