• Theo Adam (bass), Reiner Goldberg (tenor), Helmut Klotz (tenor), Horst Hiestermann (tenor), Konrad Rupf (baritone), Rolf Wollard (baritone), Ekkehard Wlaschiha (baritone), Gisela Schroter (mezzo-soprano), Gisela Pohl (alto), Norbert Klesse (boy soprano), Aloys Tinschert (tenor), Monika Vahle (soprano), Heidrun Zienecker (boy soprano), Frank Grundei (boy soprano)
• Leipzig Radio Choir, MDR Sinfonieorchester
• Herbert Kegel
• Recorded: 09 April 1973
• Recording Venue: Live recording, Kongresshalle, Leipzig, Germany

The history of Wozzeck began nearly 200 years ago, when Johann Christian Woyzeck, a onetime soldier and jobless wigmaker, killed his sweetheart with a knife in a fit of jealous rage. The tragic incident provided the material for the German playwright Georg Büchner, who interpreted the fate of Woyzeck as a mass phenomenon; in his play, Büchner portrays the convicted murdered as a hopeless, compulsive creature, a mere cog in the wheels of a destructive and repressive system that tramples all human values underfoot. Such is the message communicated in Alban Berg’s setting of the work, which was premiered more than 100 years later in Berlin. Even before its first performance the opera was already causing controversy, with critics – Schoenberg among them – labelling Berg’s decision to set Büchner’s play to music a daring and ill‐conceived venture, but in the end it proved to be one of the great successes on the stage, its perfect blend of a strictly autonomous design and dramatic expressiveness providing the perfect musical dress for the playwright’s social criticism. Berg defies operatic conventions, or ‘universal human sentiments’, instead choosing to arouse sympathy with the humiliated and ridiculed, and allowing them to utter what seems incapable of expression. An all‐star German cast – the great baritone Theo Adam and contralto Gisela Schröter among them – graces this recording of the work, recorded live in Leipzig’s Kongresshalle back in 1973. “Kegel’s Wozzeck shows typically fine judgment – intense, but not exaggerated or overwrought, powerfully emotional without indulgence or sensationalism, lucid without being analytical” (MusicWeb International).

Serious and thoroughly crafted Leipzig production. Striking the careful diction, the textual relevance of every musical phrase. (Hermes Opera Dictionary)

Hermes Opernlexikon: "Serious and thoroughly worked Leipzig production. Striking the careful diction, the textual relevance of every musical phrase."