Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s Mendelssohn, Wagner, Schumann (with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Arnold Schoenberg Choir, and soloists including Violeta Urmana and Elisabeth Kulman) is a live concert album released by Sony Classical in 2026 from previously unreleased 1999 Styriarte Festival tapes. Recorded in Graz and issued to mark the tenth anniversary of Harnoncourt’s death, it documents his first and only real foray into conducting Richard Wagner, framed by works of Mendelssohn and Schumann with which he felt a deeper historical and stylistic affinity. The programme runs about 80 minutes and includes Mendelssohn’s overture Die schöne Melusine, orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Tristan und Isolde (including the Tristan Prelude and Isolde’s “Liebestod”), and Robert Schumann’s choral Requiem für Mignon, Op. 98b.

The performance underlines Harnoncourt’s trademark approach: using the relatively modest forces of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe to reveal inner detail rather than sheer volume, especially in the Tristan Prelude and “Liebestod,” where transparent textures and careful balances make familiar music feel unusually clear and human‑scaled. Lithuanian soprano Violeta Urmana gives a glowing, gradually intensifying account of the Liebestod, while the “Bacchanale” (Venusberg music) from Tannhäuser shows the orchestra in a more “punchy and powerful” mode, evoking Wagner’s erotic excess without losing rhythmic precision. In Schumann’s Requiem für Mignon, Harnoncourt and the Arnold Schoenberg Choir focus on text and line: soloists and chorus shape Goethe’s words with ardent but controlled expression, reminding listeners that for him Schumann was as central to the Romantic canon as Beethoven or Brahms.