Robert Schumann — Das Paradies und die Peri, Op. 50
Lina Johnson — Peri
Le Concert des Nations
La Capella Nacional de Catalunya
Jordi Savall
AliaVox, AVSA9968 (double hybrid CD/SACD), 2026
My relationship with this album did not get off to a good start.
More precisely, it worked out in a perfectly pragmatic and straightforward way: I listened to it — and promptly dumped it in the Recycle Bin. (What do you call the corresponding bin for deleted Windows files? Tell me in the comments.)
Well... whatever.
There is so much music around that life is going to run out long before the music does. So in cases like this I don't suffer any particular pangs of conscience. Didn't grab me — goodbye.
Next, please!
And then I committed Error fatalis.
I listened to THIS again — this time on the right equipment.
And for the last couple of days Schumann has been reigning supreme inside my head.
Thundering.
Bouncing around as if I had just binge-listened to Peter Gabriel or Sting hits. At least with those, everything makes sense — that's what hits are for.
But for a secular oratorio from 1843, almost a hundred minutes long, that is, you have to admit, a rather cheeky result.
All in all, Das Paradies und die Peri is a strange beast.
Robert Schumann himself did not consider it an opera. It is based on one of the episodes from Thomas Moore's Lalla Rookh. And if you retell the plot briefly, you can tumble straight into a fairy tale.
Peri — a being born of the union between a fallen celestial creature and a mortal — cannot enter Paradise. She is promised that the gates will open if she brings what Heaven considers its dearest gift.
First she brings the last drop of blood shed by a young hero.
Nope.
Then — the last breath of a lover who sacrifices himself.
Nope again.
Only a tear of sincere repentance opens the gates of Paradise.
On paper — almost a children's parable.
In Schumann — an hour and a half of eine große romantische Dieselmaschine!
And this is where I had an association capable of making music reviewers nervously rearrange furniture by telekinesis: in places, I hear... Wagner.
Not literally. And I am certainly not going to argue that Schumann secretly invented Wagner in 1843 (Tristan was still a long sixteen years away). But there is something in the way the great dramatic arcs grow out of one another, the way the orchestra stops being accompaniment and becomes a participant in the action, the way separate vocal and orchestral episodes gradually merge into a continuous flow... The musical theater of the future is already waving cheerfully from just down the road. It is so close that every now and then I feel like checking the release date on the SACD case.
Jordi Savall and I have a long-standing but complicated relationship.
Complicated mainly in the sense that this period-performance maestro keeps rummaging through my pockets. Don't get the wrong impression — he simply keeps making me buy music I had no intention of buying.
There is no sense of a monument standing in front of you with a plaque:
ROBERT SCHUMANN. GREAT COMPOSER. LISTEN STANDING UP. APPLAUD LOUDLY.
The music moves. It breathes. Magic you can almost touch.
At times it is almost chamber music. A moment later there is a choir, an orchestra, and so much air that the room suddenly seems too small.
And this, incidentally, is where I understood why my first encounter ended with the Delete button. Your perception of this recording depends heavily on whether your system lets you hear more than just the notes. The second and third planes are constantly at work here. The distance between soloist and choir. Quiet orchestral layers. Microdynamics. Sudden expansion of the soundstage. The way an enormous sonic structure gradually grows out of almost nothing.
Take that away — and what remains is simply good music.
Put it back — and the Show begins.
And Savall doesn't merely put it back. He pulls it off.
Which means it is time to talk about Lina Johnson.
The thing is, I had already heard Lina Johnson with Savall. Twice. Heard her — but only now did I really begin to hear her.
As Peri she does something that makes describing her as having a “beautiful voice” simply pointless. There are plenty of beautiful voices. Even extremely beautiful ones.
This is something else, and that “something” seems to shimmer in from the Other Side of the grass.
There is a strange combination in her voice: a bright, weightless upper register, yet vocal “body” that does not disappear lower down. That is why her Peri never turns into the standard ethereal celestial creature floating prettily somewhere beneath the concert-hall ceiling, shedding white feathers onto the musicians' heads.
She has weight. Character. But also doubt. And above all — movement. Which is exactly why that ghost of Richard Wagner keeps loitering just offstage.
At the beginning she is a creature standing before closed gates. Then — hope. The first failure. The second. Weariness. Stubbornness. And gradually the voice acquires the thing for which, really, these hundred minutes exist. By the end, this is no longer the character who began the journey.
And this is where Schumann and Johnson did something rather indecent to me.
I was floored.
Not “appreciated the vocal artistry,” not “noted the excellent technique,” not... (the rest of the list consists of every review cliché polished to a mirror shine that I got sick of reading about twenty years ago).
Then I went to see what people who actually get paid to listen to classical music had written about this recording. Such lucky guys do exist. And it turned out I wasn't the only one who was floored.
Richard Wigmore in Gramophone, comparing Johnson with Barbara Bonney and Dorothea Röschmann, ultimately went so far as to call her the finest Peri on record.
Still, it would be unfair to turn this whole release into “the Lina Johnson album.” Kieran Carrel carries the narrative in such a way that the recitative function never becomes mere connective tissue between the pretty numbers. Marianne Beate Kielland, Johanna Rosa Falkinger, Ferran Mitjans, Manuel Walser — there is no sense here of “main star plus support staff.”
And the Choir.
On this recording La Capella Nacional de Catalunya can move within minutes from an almost transparent texture to a wall of Sound that never turns flat, because there is always life raging inside it.
Le Concert des Nations does much the same with the orchestral part.
I have a great fondness for recordings in which a large number of performers does not simply become a large amount of sound.
This is exactly one of those.
There is another reason this Peri got under my skin.
Schumann wrote a work about the search for the most precious thing in the world — and deliberately gives the wrong answer twice. Heroism? No. Love willing to die? No again. For a Romantic of the mid-nineteenth century, that is, incidentally, a fairly unusual move. To put it mildly.
The gates are not opened by the greatest outward sacrifice. They are opened by an inward change in a human being — spiritual catharsis.
Well, I hardly need to explain to Ukrainians of the twenty-first century what that means...
The music travels the same road. It keeps growing, promising a climax, delivering magnificent large-scale episodes — but the real resolution does not arrive because Schumann finally piles on even more splendour with an epic choir, gleaming brass and filigree strings.
You have to get there.
Crawl there.
Scrape your way there.
Grow into it.
Perhaps that is why this creation works so poorly in fragments.
And is so damn contagious whole.
Technically, the recording... Well, it's Alia Vox.
And I don't even feel like spending much time on the usual audiophile autopsy of the corpse.
Yes, the soundstage is huge. Yes, the imaging is excellent. Yes, the voices have natural scale. Yes, you can listen to the acoustics, distances, string textures, choir, dynamic range and spend another twenty minutes talking about the air around the performers. It is all there.
But if, ten minutes in, you are still listening to the width of the soundstage, something has gone wrong.
Because two minutes in, Peri is already there.
She has materialised inside your head. And she couldn't give a damn how many centimetres there are between the left loudspeaker and the first violin.
Conclusion.
Albums that leave questions behind interest me far more than albums I have completely figured out after the first listen.
But there is one thing I know for certain about this recording.
A few days ago I deleted this album.
Today Schumann is playing inside my head as if there were a Stereo System in there.
And I am sitting here wondering which part of the recording to add to my test compilation.
Not a bad career for a deleted file.
Robert Schumann — Das Paradies und die Peri.
Jordi Savall.
Lina Johnson.
Alia Vox.
Brought back to life.
My System:
- Speakers: Audio Physic, model Avanti, first generation.
- Power Amp: NuPrime, model STA-9 (4 pcs in mono mode).
- Pre-Amp: PS Audio, model PCA-2 (with external PSU).
- DAC: AMR, model DP-777.
- CD Transport: Ayon CD-T.
- Rack (audio furniture): DYI from Ikea tables, model Hemnes with Monacor spikes.
- Speakers' Cable: Neotech Formosa (2 pairs).
- Digital cable: MIT Proline Digital (AES/EBU).
- Component Cables: 1) Neotech Formosa ITR-1 (RCA); 2) hybrid Neotech NEI-3002 OCC/SPUPOCC (balanced);
3) hybrid Neotech NEI-3002 OCC/SPUPOCC (2 pairs x 8.4 m).
- Power Cables: 1) DYI cables made from polished soviet military copper bus with German connectors;
2) Neotech NEP-3001 MK3 3x5.25 OCC/SPUPOCC - hybrid power
cable with Neotech NC-P303 OCС EU power plug Gold (2 pcs x 1.5 m on
Power Amps); 3) Neotech
The Sahara (1.75m) - 2 pcs.
- Accessories: DYI footers under units, speakers and acoustic cable.
- TTAF Power Bar Schuko 8 Extreme Line.
