Release Date: 12 January 2001
Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 636943484128
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: WEBERN
Description
Anton Webern (1883-1945)Orchestral MusicAnton Webern was born in Vienna on 3rd December 1883. His first compositions date from before the turn of the century, with early pieces that are competent exercises in mid-Romanticism, as in the 1904 idyll Im Sommerwind (In the Summer Wind). In 1904 he began an intensive period of study with Arnold Schoenberg, who was then working towards an expansion of the tonal boundaries of Western art music. After formal tuition ended in 1908, Schoenberg continued to act as a mentor and advisor to Webern until he left Germany in 1933. Between 1908 and 1920, apart from a brief period of war service, Webern took up, and often quickly abandoned, conducting posts throughout the Austro-German territories, while writing a sequence of works, the temporal proportions of which were increasingly compressed. In 1920 he settled at Mödling, near Vienna, where he earned a living through choral conducting and private teaching. There were also conducting engagements abroad, notably with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, though Webern’s painstaking and ascetic manner found little favour. Nevertheless, with the support of his publisher Universal Edition, he composed steadily through to the early 1940s, though the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938 left him with little means of support and no public performances. In Mittersill, near Salzburg, with his wife at the end of World War Two, he was preparing to return to Vienna when, on 15th September, he was shot and killed by an American soldier in a tragic case of mistaken identity. With fellow-members of the Second Viennese School, Schoenberg and Berg, Webern was a great believer in innovation within the Western musical tradition. This reflected itself, in his case, in particular emphasis on the polyphonic composers of the Renaissance and early Baroque (he was awarded a doctorate in 1906 for his study of Heinrich Isaac). In the words of his pupil, the British composer Humphrey Searle, "Webern was an idealist, completely dedicated to his conception of music, which he regarded as a phenomenon of Nature rather than Art: he was always aiming to find the natural laws which music must follow". The Passacaglia, Opus 1, was written in 1908, towards the end of Webern’s four-year period of formal composition lessons with Schoenberg. A set of variations on a ground bass, the passacaglia is among the strictest of classical forms, and one in which Webern’s inclination towards contrapuntal writing, the combination of individual musical lines, is fully engaged. The eight-bar theme, announced by plucked strings, contains one note foreign to the key of D minor, which enables Webern to pursue the chromatically extended approach to tonality that Schoenberg had been pursuing in his most recent works. That said, the strict, often austere logic of the piece recalls Brahms, notably the Bachian passacaglia which concludes his Fourth Symphony. Indeed, Webern’s Passacaglia connects w
Tracklisting
Dariia Lytvishko
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Alice Di Piazza; Basel Sinfonietta; NDR Bigband; Titus Engel
Anna Alas i Jove; Miquel Villalba
David Childs; Black Dyke Band; Nicholas Childs
Zenz:Cathariou:Iacovidou
Zahir Ensemble
Yun-Yi Qin
