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| Portrait of Schoenberg by Man Ray, c. 1925 |
The Festival is honoring the 150th anniversary of the birth of Arnold Schoenberg with eleven concerts featuring his music. I am attending two of them. This one, with the Camerata Salzburg, contains the fairly early work Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) which was possibly the first chamber music to have a programmatic narrative. But let's start with the hall. This concert was in the smallest of the festival venues, the Mozarteum Grosser Saal across the river from the main venues. The hall was converted from an older villa just before WWI and I estimate seats about 800 people.
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| Mozarteum Grosser Saal |
The program consisted of three works, the Siegfried Idyll by Wagner dating from 1870, Kammersymphonie (1916) by Franz Schreker, who was primarily an opera composer and Verklärte Nacht, dating from 1899 (this version, for chamber orchestra, was done in 1943) by Arnold Schoenberg.
The Wagner is a familiar work, but Franz Schreker was unknown to me. On first listening it seemed a fine work with a lot of interesting textures and orchestrations. Perhaps a composer worth exploring. But we were really here for the Schoenberg. I first bought a vinyl disc of this way back in the 70s so I have heard it hundreds of times. But as time goes on I am more and more convinced that this is a really fine, probably great, work. I notice that the works by Schoenberg chosen for the festival focus are more early and middle than late (no piano or violin concertos, for example) and it certainly shows that while Schoenberg's innovations (pan-tonality, Neo-classicism, klangfarbenmelodie and so on) always get the most attention in program notes, the truth is that he wrote very, very fine music in all stages of his career. And this is an example. Sometimes I think there are too many codas, but this is a powerful, expressive, and profound work from beginning to end.
The Festival always has interesting programs and this page caught my attention:
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| Some analytical notes written in Barcelona in 1932 |
When I get home I might sit down with the score and see what it is about. The performance was really outstanding. The leader of the Camerata on this occasion, concert master Giovanni Guzzo, seems a supremely happy man and he and his orchestra are superb.
4 comments:
There are barely any performances of Schoenberg's serial works even in Europe. The vast majority of his works performed were composed before WW1 cf bachtrack. Stravinsky does a bit better but still about half of his works performed were composed before the end of WW1. The only significant composers after WW1 are Prokofiev and Shostakovich who are equal or significantly more performed respectively as Stravinsky these days.
On Tuesday Pierre-Laurent Aimard is playing a program including six piano pieces by Schoenberg of which four are serial. Another concert features the String Quartet no. 2 which, I believe, if not a serial piece, was his first atonal piece. In another concert they are doing the Five Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16, again, not serial, but very advanced in terms of technique. The third movement, for example, is the original example of "Klangfarbenmelodie."
I was specifically referencing serial since free atonal in practice does not sound completely non-tonal. Of course even serialism can be subverted by the choice of a tone row with tonal implications a la Berg. It is amazing how consistently the dividing line of WW1 has held up. Even Stravinsky's neoclassical works 1925-50 while performed fairly often, if one considers the entire group, have very modest individual opus performance numbers.
You know, I'm really not terribly interesting in statistics.
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