This is very close to what it must be like to hear Wozzeck from the prompter's box: everything in close-up, the singers very close indeed, not a breath of atmosphere, hardly a trace of a surrounding acoustic. The only sign that this was a concert performance rather than a studio broadcast is that the singers are obviously projecting: dynamics are fairly consistently marked up, presumably out of concern for people at the back of the hall. At times the result is deafening: set the volume control for a comfortable orchestral perspective, and along comes (say) Horst Hiestermann's penetrating and vocally fearless Captain and terrifies you out of your wits.
It all makes for an extreme analytical clarity, of course, and I suspect that some of this is the engineers' doing. Was the celeste that marks the Doctor's taking of his own pulse really at the very front of the concert platform? This sort of thing adds to the feeling of a lack of any believable space around the performers. With the exception of the military band (properly off-stage, as directed) one isn't quite sure where anybody is supposed to be.
The performance is not a comfortable one to experience at such pitilessly close range. It is fast, attacking and, for much of the time, ferociously loud. The brass players in particular (including a very cornet-like, even bugle-like first trumpet and a group of enthusiastically vibrato trombones) are given their head in the more violent pages, and the phantasmagoric inn-scene, with its accordion and out-of-tune piano, is frightening. As it should be, of course, and there are many pages on which this hot-and-strong, Pelion-upon-Ossa approach strips the varnish from a work that is in danger of being softened by orchestral virtuosity and the awarding of a Twentieth-Century Classic certificate.
All Berg's lurid and fantastic colours, his refracted march-tunes, folk-songs and drunken tavern ballads are (to borrow a title from Wyndham Lewis) a ''malign fiesta'' against which Wozzeck and Marie are projected in strong and jarringly pathetic relief. They could not be without strong performances in those roles. Adam's ability to refine the bass element from his bass-baritone voice, and thus any hint of a working-class Wotan, is praiseworthy, but that element is kept in reserve to add real danger to Wozzeck's outbursts of rage. In some of Marie's lines that Berg carefully asks to be half-spoken as Sprechstimme, Schroter disobeys and sings them. I would object to this more if her object were not so very obvious: to present Marie as no less of a victim than Wozzeck, which she does with a purity of voice (all the more remarkable in such a close perspective) that gives her great poignancy. The other members of the cast are all so pungent, so fully inside their characters, that it is almost impossible to believe that this was a one-off concert performance: either a staging or an exceptional number of rehearsals must have preceded it.
The vicious recorded perspective and some of Kegel's very fast tempos (including Wozzeck's death-scene; but isn't there a case for regarding him at this point as driven, stumbling in his terror?) make this no real rival to Abbado's vivid reading, but it would be a pity if on that account it were set aside as a failure. There are many pages of such intensity and anger that you're salutarily reminded of what a troubling opera this should always be. The accompanying booklet, by the way, includes a summary of the plot but no libretto.'