RECORDS / DOUBLE PLAY: How to get rich quick: Edward Seckerson and Stephen Johnson compare notes

KORNGOLD: Das Wunder der Heliane

Soloists, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

and Chorus / John Mauceri

(Decca 436 636-2: three CDs)

PREPARE to be amazed. Die tote Stadt was just the dress rehearsal. Das Wunder der Heliane, Korngold's second full-length opera, is a scorcher - a kind of Turandot meets Elektra meets Die Frau ohne Schatten. How anything this major could have languished virtually unheard since the late 1920s quite simply beggars belief. Musical politics played a part - that's another long story; and casting of the two incredibly demanding principal roles will always have posed problems. Even so, there is no more conclusive evidence of Korngold's prodigious talent.

Certainly Heliane is over-rich and overwrought, rapture piled upon rapture, harmony upon harmony. But it's the stunning assurance with which Korngold flings down the musical drama, the voices truly an extension of the orchestra, the orchestra in a perpetual state of enchantment, iridescent with the glint of keyboard instruments (rippling piano and celesta arpeggios, swathes of harp glissandi), shot through with Mahlerian forces of darkness - bony rattlings of xylophone and con legno strings.

This orchestral song with words takes the voices on some quite extraordinary flights. Heliane's great second- act aria has to be one of the tastiest morsels of the entire period: Anna Tomowa-Sintow takes the upward curves with relish, a wonderful instance of music proclaiming what the words cannot. And she sustains that radiance right through to a final scene whose seething use of the chorus (often wordless) and transcendent 'love conquers all' duet zealously redefines the term 'operatic Gothic'. But perhaps the real wonder of Heliane is that it is not ultimately overshadowed by the likes of Die Frau ohne Schatten - the score with which it has most in common, sonically and spiritually. Certainly not now. John Mauceri and Decca have delivered with a will. I'm still reeling. ES

'DEGENERATE Music', the Nazis' label for Das Wunder der Heliane, is revived in bold letters on the front of the new Decca box. To modern ears it sounds promising - until one discovers that the nasty shenanigans surrounding the opera's premiere and subsequent banning had little to do with Korngold's score. Is the message in any way subversive? Perhaps the long nude scene would have set the Mrs Whitehouses of the Third Reich tutting, but the text, with its flat, melodramatic characters is more of an affront to drama than to extreme right-wing politics. Musically, Das Wunder der Heliane is quite an achievement - if only for the way it seems to lurch from climax to climax to yet bigger climax. It's exhausting enough for the listener; what it must have done to the singers is frightening to contemplate. Voices with stamina rather than alluring beauty seem to have been the general decision here - wisely perhaps - though Anna Tomowa-Sintow brings real ardour to her big moments. Mauceri, the Berlin Radio Chorus and Orchestra drive it for all it's worth. But in the end, what empty hokum it is - brilliant, wildly gestural, but beneath the rouged surface, anaemic. Degenerate? If only it were. SJ

SCHOENBERG: Pelleas und Melisande. Variations, Op 31

Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Pierre Boulez

(Erato 2292-45827-2)

MAETERLINCK according to Schoenberg is a little like Korngold without the voices - a lush, fertile narrative where the play of light and shadow, the mingling and superimposition of harmony and texture, achieve a dream-like fluidity. Rather too fluid in the case of this big, reverberant Erato recording. My preference is for a less recessed overview of Schoenberg's complex score, a fleshier, more centred sound - Karajan on DG.

Such innovatory detail as the slippery trombone glissandi where Golaud leads Pelleas to his dank subterranean tombs are so fatally remote as to be ineffectual. But Boulez traces a compelling narrative up to and beyond the brutal coitus interruptus of the nocturnal love scene, culminating in a pristine realisation of Melisande's passing. As to that thornier second-cousin, the Variations, Boulez is strong on developmental pull, the sense of ideas shaping and re-shaping. But here is a frigid kind of beauty, hard to fathom, harder to love. ES

PASSING from Korngold to Schoenberg's ripe, headily atmospheric Pelleas tone-poem is like moving from virtual reality to the thing itself. The levels on which this music operates - from one-movement symphony to indulgent mood-painting - are richly various. Other conductors may have found more unease, more of Maeterlink's emotional claustrophobia in the piece, but it can rarely have sounded so fastidiously beautiful - so French, I'd be tempted to say, if it weren't for the long-breathed melodic swing and subtle sense of flux Boulez also brings to it.

Not quite everything in the orchestral Variations yields so readily to Boulez's refining touch, but it's surprising how much of it does benefit - the first, ghostly stirrings of the introduction, for instance, or the intricate pianissimo textures of the slow Variation VII. Perhaps some of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra soloists could have shaped their lines with a little more feeling. Even after the transition to complete 12-tone serialism Schoenberg could turn a lovely melodic phrase. But against this are so many gains in delicacy and lucidity. The theme itself still sounds drily contrived, but as to what Schoenberg does with it - if Boulez retains his old doubts about the variations themselves, he keeps them well hidden. SJ

RAWSTHORNE: Piano Concertos 1 & 2; Concerto for Two Pianos

Geoffrey Tozer, Tamara-Anna Cislowski (pianos) Matthias Bamert

(Chandos CHAN 9125)

IF THERE'S to be an Alan Rawsthorne revival, it might start here, and with performances like these. All sense of mustiness is gone - just vitality and sparkling cleverness, with glimpses of richer and stranger worlds. Excellent recordings, atmospheric but clear. SJ