St John’s Smith Square, London
Lee Reynolds’ reduced arrangements of Schoenberg and Mahler were convincing and involving
The concerts of the Society for Private Musical Performances that Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils established in Vienna in 1919 regularly included performances of arrangements that reduced contemporary orchestral scores to more convenient ensemble proportions. But even Schoenberg avoided the challenge of scaling down his monodrama Erwartung, one of the landmark achievements of his atonal expressionist years. Yet, that was the task that conductor Lee Reynolds set himself, and he made his version of the score the first item in his concert with the Southbank Sinfonia devoted to music from the 1900s.
Reynolds revealed his skill as an arranger during the Covid lockdown, when he reduced the score of Ravel’s L’Enfant et les Sortilèges to 27 players for a hugely successful video version of the opera. For Erwartung, he used an orchestra of 35, with double wind rather than the quadruple forces specified by Schoenberg, and just 20 strings. In the warm acoustic of St John’s it sounded totally convincing, with the febrile intensity of the original preserved quite wonderfully. The soprano protagonist in this enigmatic scena, who may or may not have murdered the lover whose body she discovers, was Philippa Boyle, rising magnificently to meet every challenge of the formidably demanding vocal lines; it made for a totally involving experience.
