Sir Georg Solti has come to record Moses und Aron the best part of two decades after he conducted the opera in Peter Hall's Covent Garden production. As is clear from his comments accompanying these LPs and his note on page 847, his faith in Schoenberg's most ambitious dramatic project remains undimmed and he believes that, with increasing familiarity, the music becomes ''clearer, less complicated, and more expressive and romantic''. This may well be true, but I think that becoming familiar with the opera also reinforces its remarkable ambiguity and originality. Moses und Aron is a necessarily and challengingly diverse composition. At one extreme, the choral counterpoint with its traditional imitative techniques: at the other, the concentratedly expressionist orchestral writing. Then there is the almost blatant, post-Mahlerian vulgarity of parts of the ''Dance round the Golden Calf'', in complete contrast to the visionary, discomfiting density of scenes like the first, in which superimpositions of speech and song, voices and instruments, leave the listener straining to find the centre, to discover the idea behind the images in this confrontation between human and divine. Add to all this the fact that there is a text for a third act that Schoenberg never set, and we have something which, however expressive and romantic, is still very much a problem piece.
The odss are that any studio recording of Moses will be stronger in textural clarity and accuracy of detail than in theatrical atmosphere. Yet the latter is certainly not lacking in Solti's performance, especially in the second act. Since Act 1 is less conventionally theatrical anyway, it is not surprising that it is here that you are likely to be most aware of artists working conscientiously in a recording studio (Orchestra Hall, Chicago). But there are moments of excitement in Act 1, too, which seem to bear out Solti's confident claim that ''the more we rehearsed and played the easier the work became''. As Moses, Franz Mazura consistently stresses the character's torments of self-doubt. His approach to the relative intervals and range indicated by the Sprechgesang notation is very free: in particular, he shuns the lower registers which Schoenberg often indicates and which might, literally, give the character more profundity, more stature—especially at the end—and make him seem less like a close relative of Mazura's other major role in twentieth-century opera, Dr Schon in Berg's Lulu. Philip Langridge is an experienced Schoenbergian and, in making Aaron convincingly attractive rather than merely aggressive, he provides an excellent foil to the hectoring Moses. There is not always enough sheer power, or sufficient evenness of vocal production, but he is helped by a recorded sound—transferred at a relatively low level—which seems prepared to sacrifice some clarity of orchestral detail to ensure that the principal vocal lines come through.
It is certainly good that the recording does not attempt artificially to oversimplify or stratify the work's blended textures, and it well serves the music's vertiginous exploration of the borderland between complexity and chaos, inscrutable divinity and argumentative humanity. In this precarious balance lies the impact and quality of the whole performance, with its generally good supporting cast; it also explains the abiding fascination of Schoenberg's last attempt to bring a great philosophical issue to dramatic life.'