Alban Berg: "Wozzeck"

(Teldec)

Dial a track code: 1971

Operatic characters are always rabbiting on about "the madness of love" and such like, but genuine, honest to God psychosis is something opera rarely has the courage to confront. Alban Berg's opera after a play by Georg Buchner, Wozzeck, about a man who murdered his mistress, is a profoundly disturbing piece. Wozzeck is not evil, but a luckless innocent in a dreadful world: the music seems not so much to describe madness as to be madness, as it hurls itself from one terrifyingly lucid explosion to another. Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin throw themselves into the fray with a suitable vengeance in this live recording, in which bloodcurdling bass and deafening drums alternate with moments of uneasy quiet. Waltraut Meier cuts an unsettling figure as the faithless Marie. Now I'm not saying she deserved to die, but.

Louis Andriessen: "De Materie" (two discs) Nonesuch

Dial a track code: 2081

Louis Andriessen, now in his mid 50s, is probably the most influential composer working in the Netherlands today. His De Materie (Matter) is a music theatre work in tour parts, each about 25 minutes long, which he created with Robert Wilson. It was premiered at the Netherlands Opera in 1989.

The texts range from the erotically charged writing of the 13th century poet. Hadewijch, to 17th century ship building instructions and the description of an encounter with Mondrian.

The musical composition engages with proportions as diverse as those of Reims Catherdal and Mondrian's Composition With Red, Yellow, And Blue.

But the flavour is typically Andriessen often hard edged and raunchy, with the strings, small in number, usually outweighed by brass, woodwind, keyboards and percussion.

It's tempting to see the work as a sort of symphony, with a slow, lyrical second movement and a funk meets boogie woogie scherzo in the third. Andriessen's music is often characterised by a highly individual minimalistic effervescence of vocal and instrumental timbre. The solo soprano set against chattering low clarinets of Part 2 or the chaste chorus behind the punching instrumental writing of Part 3 are memorable effects in a piece which, whatever its level of surface activity, seems to be concerned with some sort of slowly unfolding monumentality.

The performance by the Schonberg and Asko Ensembles with the Netherlands Chamber Choir under Reinbert de Leeuw is first rate.