Sony Classical: Berg — Wozzeck (Boulez, Berry, Strauss) The Sony Opera House (2-CD)

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Product Details:

• Product Type: Audio CD
• Brand / Label: Sony Classical
• Composer: Alban Berg (1885–1935)
• Title: Wozzeck
• Series: The Sony Opera House
• Conductor: Pierre Boulez
• Ensemble: Orchestre et Chœur de l'Opéra de Paris
• Release Year: 2009 (recording 1971)
• UPC: 886974461923
• Catalog Number: 88697446192
• Genre: Classical, Opera
• Condition: New / Factory Sealed

Product Features

• Format: CD
• Discs: 2
• Total timing: 94:44
• Sound: ADD
• Source: opera after the drama by Georg Büchner
• Chorus director: Jean Laforge
• Made in the EU
• Language: German

Overview

Pierre Boulez's 1971 Wozzeck is one of the landmark recordings of Alban Berg's shattering opera, reissued here in Sony's Opera House series. Boulez, the great clarifier of twentieth-century scores, leads the Paris Opera forces with razor precision, laying bare the structure of a work that can otherwise overwhelm.

Walter Berry is a deeply human Wozzeck — the put-upon soldier driven to murder and madness — with Isabel Strauss a vivid Marie. Fritz Uhl's Drum Major and Carl Doench's Doctor complete a strong cast drawn from the German-language tradition that Berg's opera demands.

Based on Büchner's fragmentary drama, Wozzeck compresses tragedy into tight, expressionist scenes. Boulez illuminates Berg's hidden forms — the passacaglia, the inventions — while never losing the opera's raw emotional charge.

For collectors of modern opera and admirers of Boulez, this is essential. It remains one of the most lucid and intense accounts of a twentieth-century masterpiece, now at an accessible price.

Interesting Facts

• Wozzeck premiered in Berlin in 1925 and is widely regarded as the first great opera of the twentieth-century modernist movement.
• Berg based the libretto on Georg Büchner's unfinished play Woyzeck, written in the 1830s and left in fragments at the author's death.
• Pierre Boulez was both a leading composer and a conductor famed for his clarity in complex modern scores.
• Walter Berry, the title role here, was one of the most admired bass-baritones of the postwar era, equally at home in Mozart and modern repertoire.
• The opera is built on hidden classical forms — a suite, a passacaglia, a rondo — that Berg embedded beneath its expressionist surface.
• This recording was made with the Orchestra and Chorus of the Paris Opera in 1971 and reissued in Sony's Opera House line in 2009.

Track Listing

Alban Berg: Wozzeck — opera in three acts (complete), across 2 discs.

Principal cast: Walter Berry (Wozzeck), Isabel Strauss (Marie), Fritz Uhl (Drum Major), Albert Weikenmeier (Andres), Marilyn Schmiege (Captain), Carl Doench (Doctor), Ingeborg Lasser (Margret), Walter Poduschka & Raymond Steffner (Apprentices), Gérard Dunan (Idiot).

Publishers

Reissued 2009 by Sony Classical / Sony Music Entertainment (catalog 88697446192) in The Sony Opera House series. Original recording 1971. Orchestre et Chœur de l'Opéra de Paris, chorus director Jean Laforge. Made in the EU.

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