Latest Album Release: A New Recording from the ONPL: Korngold, Schreker, Krenek

Sep 10, 2025
3 min read

Updated: Apr 19

There are moments when music speaks not only of its own time but of ours. The new recording by the Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire under the direction of Sascha Goetzel does exactly that. As his debut album with the ONPL, it marks both a beginning and a return—a beginning of a new artistic partnership, and a return to a period of music that feels startlingly close to our present: the fin de siècle and its aftermath.

A Journey into the Fin de Siècle

This album brings together three composers whose lives and works reflect the turbulence, beauty, and contradictions of early 20th-century Vienna: Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Schreker, and Ernst Krenek. Each responds differently to a society in flux—caught between nostalgia and reinvention, tradition and rebellion.

Korngold’s Sinfonietta radiates youthful exuberance, written when he was just 16. It carries the glow of Viennese waltzes but with the ambition and orchestral richness of Mahler and Strauss. Its “motif of the joyful heart” sets the tone for a work overflowing with colour and vitality.
Schreker’s Overture to Die Gezeichneten is a rare jewel—lush, mysterious, almost dreamlike in its shifting harmonies. Once wildly successful (a thousand performances of his operas before 1930), Schreker’s music was silenced by the Nazi regime and only rediscovered decades later. Here, his orchestral voice returns with all its iridescent power.
Krenek’s Potpourri reflects the restless, playful spirit of the Weimar Republic. With hints of cabaret, jazz, and even a wink to Bach, it is both witty and subversive—a reminder that irony and experimentation were part of Vienna’s DNA.

Together, these works form a triptych of an era on the brink: Romanticism giving way to Expressionism, tradition fractured into fragments of modernity.

More Than Music: A Cultural Awakening

Around these composers, artists like Klimt, Schiele, and Zweig in Vienna, or Picasso, Ravel, and Cocteau in Paris, were questioning form, identity, and the role of the artist in a changing world. The ONPL’s program places Korngold, Schreker, and Krenek back into that larger conversation—a dialogue between music, painting, literature, and the restless spirit of the early 20th century.

Why It Matters Today

These works are not only historical rediscoveries. They echo our own times: uncertain, fractured, but alive with creativity. They ask the same questions we face now: What do we preserve? What do we let go? How do we create beauty out of upheaval?

For Sascha Goetzel and the ONPL, this recording is an artistic statement: music as cultural memory, music as dialogue with the present. It is not just about scores rediscovered—it is about voices restored, and stories retold for today’s listeners.

The Orchestra and Its Mission

The Orchestre National des Pays de la Loire is one of France’s most vibrant symphonic ensembles, with around a hundred musicians performing more than 200 concerts each year in Nantes, Angers, across the region, and abroad. Since 2022, Sascha Goetzel has been its Music Director, bringing a vision that connects tradition with innovation, and local roots with international horizons.

This album is their first collaboration on record—a milestone, and the opening chapter of a larger journey.

Final Thoughts

This debut recording of the ONPL under Sascha Goetzel is not just a showcase of rarely heard works. It is an invitation: to listen beyond the notes, to feel the contradictions of an era, and to hear in them reflections of our own time.

As Goetzel writes in his introduction: “These works don’t offer answers, but they ask the right questions. What do we preserve? What do we let go? How do we rebuild beauty from uncertainty?”

In the end, that is what makes this album so powerful: it gives us music to enjoy, but also questions to carry with us—resonating far beyond the concert hall.