Saturday, 28th November 2020

Supersonic pizzicato for David Philip Hefti's "The Snow Queen"

This musical story follows the fairy tale The Snow Queen by the Danish poet Hans Christian Andersen to a libretto by Andreas Schäfer. Daniel Philip Hefti composed the music. The first performance by the Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, which commissioned it, is now recorded.

The story is about a little girl who is looking for her longtime playmate who has been kidnapped by the Snow Queen. Like many other fairy tales from Andersen's pen, this one also deals with the small happiness of ordinary people in a humorous and ironic way. The girl's search takes place in dreamlike scenarios in which she encounters various figures, until she frees the one she is looking for with her tears.

Although Hefti works with a modern tonal language including microtonal elements, this music unfolds a more than appealing soundscape. This may also be due to the fact that one listens to the sung or spoken words and perceives the music more as a component that illuminates and characterizes moods than as an independent element, so that in combination with the voices it unfolds a more enchanting than disturbing effect. The dedicated playing of the Tonhalle Orchestra from Zurich under the direction of the composer, exploring the delicacies of the score, also contributes to this.

As a singer, Mojca Erdmann fills the four roles assigned to her, especially that of the snow queen, with intensity and clear structure, without appearing vocally strained. The narrators, each in two roles, Delia Meyer mainly as Gerda and Max Simonischek as Kay, manage to convey the dreamlike and somewhat surreal scenes in an expressive way. In this way, the composer and librettist have created a wonderfully fairytale-like basis, which the interpreters put into practice in an appealing way.

Uwe Krusch