Probably pretty much everyone is familiar with Géricault’s painting Le Radeau de la Méduse, depicting scenes of horror after a shipwreck.  The story behind it is much less well known.  The year is 1816 and a French expedition is off to reoccupy Senegal which had been occupied by the British during the recent wars.  The flagship of the expedition is the frigate La Méduse, which carries the governor and his staff and so on.  Well ahead of the rest of the flotilla, and out of sight, La Méduse runs aground and is eventually abandoned.  The governor, the officers and other nobs take to the boats towing the rest of the crew (154 men and boys) on a hastily improvised raft.  Finding progress too slow after 24 hours they cut the raft adrift.  When the raft is finally spotted fifteen men are still alive. A fitting allegory for the Bourbon restoration perhaps.

In that interesting year 1968 Hans Werner Henze, perhaps unsurprisingly, chose the story as the basis for an oratorio in memory of Che Guevara.  It’s a work designed to have a bit of staging.  In summary, the narrator Charon (a speaking role) occupies the fore stage.  At centre behind him is La Mort who is a high soprano.  The mixed adult and children’s chorus plus the other narrator, Jean-Charles (baritone), a member of the crew, occupy one side of the stage.  As people die they cross to the other side setting up a sort of antiphonal relationship between living and dead.  While the piece is basically in German, the dead sing lines from Dante in Italian.

Henze’s music is almost always a mix of lyrical and abrasive.  Much of Das Floß der Medusa is at the harsher end of the spectrum, looking forward to works like We Come to the River, but La Mort and the dead do get some very lyrical stuff too.  It’s complex, dramatic and convincing.  If you are going to make music out of class war this is a pretty good way of doing it.

The recording was made at a live performance in Vienna’s Konzerthaus in 2017.  It’s very good.  All three soloists; Sarah Wegener as La Mort, Dietrich Henschel as Jean-Charles and Sven-Eric Bechtolf as Charon are excellent.  They are very well backed up by the ORF Vienna Radfo Symphony Orchestra, the Arnold Schoenberg Chor and the Wiener Sängerknaben with Cornelius Meister conducting.

It’s a high definition recording with lots of presence and spatial depth and it comes with an excellent booklet with full text and lots of background on the piece and it’s performance history.  It’s available as a physical CD or digitally in MP3, standard res FLAC and 24 bit/96kHz FLAC.  I listened to the hi-def version.

Definitely worth listening to for anyone interested in either Henze and/or the more politically engaged music of the 1960/70s.

Catalogue number: Capriccio C5482