Classical review: Pfitzner: Von Deutscher Seele, Kringelborn/Stutzmann/Ventris/Holl/Berlin Radio Choir/Deutsches SO Berlin

When the Nazis presented their infamous exhibition of "degenerate music" in Dusseldorf in 1938, documenting all the composers who had been proscribed as well as the musicians who performed them, they also organised a parallel series of concerts in the city devoted to works by composers who had received official approval. The first to be heard was Richard Strauss's opera Arabella, and that was followed a night later by Hans Pfitzner's "romantic cantata" Von Deutscher Seele, a giant orchestral song cycle-like setting of poems by Joseph von Eichendorff. Strauss may have been a naively apolitical figure, but Pfitzner was a self-confessed antisemite and a long-standing and public supporter of the Nazis, who craved to be adopted by the Third Reich as its standard-bearing composer, and he stuck to his fascist beliefs even after 1945.

All of which makes it hard now to take a dispassionate view of this strangely powerful work, which had been well-received on its first performance in 1922, and was repeated in New York the following year. This fascinating recording, taken from performances given by Ingo Metzmacher in Berlin last year, which themselves aroused considerable controversy in the city, only reinforces the paradox. For on purely musical terms there is no doubt that Von Deutscher Seele (Of the German Soul) is one of Pfitzner's most convincing works, and one that in some ways belies both his reputation and his own writings as an arch musical as well as political conservative. Though the work remains rooted in late 19th-century romanticism, a number of the composers whom Pfitzner had condemned are echoed in aspects of the cantata, including Mahler and Debussy and even Schoenberg, whose Gurrelieder could have been the formal model for Von Deutscher Seele's sequence of vocal settings articulated by tumultuous orchestral interludes.

The two halves of the cantata - called Man and Nature, and Life and Singing respectively - create a symmetrical arch-like structure, and Metzmacher's performance, with an outstanding quartet of soloists and superb choral singing, leaves no doubt of the coherence of that whole. It's an intensely serious, dark-hued work which taken on its own terms (if that is at all possible) is a powerfully impressive achievement.