It’s still a few weeks until Easter, but Frank Martin’s “Polyptyque” for violin and two small string orchestras told the Passion of Christ in the concert of the Munich Chamber Orchestra in the Prinzregententheater in a finely touching, cross-denominational and sometimes cleverly abstract way. The six movements describe a noisy scene on Palm Sunday with Jesus as a haven of peace, the Last Supper, the lonely Jesus in Gethsemane, Judgment and the Way of the Cross, and finally the Resurrection, entitled “L’image de la Glorification”.
Christian Tetzlaff was the great soloist, sometimes as Christ, sometimes as Judas or simply as primus inter pares, who didn’t sweeten Martin’s gripping astringency with the sweetness of the violin tone, but always knew exactly when to dominate, when to merge with the collective. It was just as gripping in the attack as it was in the glass-breathed redemption at the end.
How nice that afterwards there was not the “Metamorphoses for 23 solo strings” by the aged Richard Strauss, as planned, but Arnold Schönberg’s early “Verklärte Nacht” in a string orchestra version with a few wonderful solo passages. Here, too, a story is told, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel: How a woman confesses to her lover that she is expecting a child from another man and that the lover accepts the unborn child as a matter of course.
With Tetzlaff and Daniel Giglberger at the first consoles, there was a compelling musical logic and a fine balance at every moment. This mature interpretation could have been put on CD in its entirety, for the MKO proved that the string orchestra version possesses just as great musical qualities as the strictness of the original sextet version, provided one plays so outstandingly. Luckily, the strangely half-baked beginning with Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor K. 546 was far away, almost forgotten.