Release Date: 01 January 2000
Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics
Packaging Type: Jewel Case
No of Units: 1
Barcode: 730099487023
Genres: Classical
Composer/Series: SCHOENBERG / BERG / WEBERN
Description
Arnold SchoenbergAlban BergAnton Webern Piano WorksSchoenberg was a largely self-taught composer;yet he became the most influential teacher of his time. Among his earliestpupils, from the autumn of 1904, were Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Both wouldremain close to their teacher long after their apprentice years were over, somuch so that the three are known collectively as the 'Second Viennese School'Despite the nutorious revolutionary nature ofhis own music, as a teacher Schoenberg instilled a deep respect for tradition.These apparently contradictory facets of Schoenberg's influence meet and fusein the Sonata (1908) which Bergwrote towards the end of his four years of study, and which must rank as musichistory's most extraordinary Op. 1. Berg seems to have intended the work as asort of graduation piece, as is apparent in the conscientious working out ofideas, or in the classical shape of its one-movement structure. Yet any senseof worthy student essay is swept aside in the titanic struggle between, on theone side, the new world, into which Schoenberg was moving, and the former tiesof key and tonality to which the Sonata just,but only just, remains anchored. A microcosm of Berg's vision is the very firstphrase, an angular rising motif or 'question', from which the music drifts,through a melodic sequence inflected by chromatic and wholetone harmonies, tofind its answer in B minor, the nominal key of the Sonata. These initial ideas pervade almost every bar, in alava-flow of inspiration, stemmed only by lyrical transitions of intensebeauty. The music's passionate search for resolution proves elusive, however,until at the very end, in a sublime coda, Bergquietly but emphatically sides with tradition.For Schoenberg, as for many twentieth-centurycomposers, the piano was the medium for experiment, to which he turned at twokey points in his development One came around 1909 when with the pace of changein his music threatening to become overwhelming, Schoenberg completed a seriesof works of extreme radicalism, the song-cycle DasBuch der hiingenden Garten, the FivePieces for Orchestra, Op,16, andthe monodrama Erwartung. This achievementwas in spite of personal tragedy, the elopement of Schoenberg's wife, Mathilde,with his friend the painter Richard Gerstl, who subsequently committed suicide,and public incomprehension, as in the hostile reception in 1908 of the Second String Quartet, The Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11, dating fromFebruary and August 1909, are often cited as marking Schoenberg's decisivebreak with tonality. In the first we can now hear vestiges of the past in thecompressed, dramatic use of sonata form, or the rich Brahms-like chording; butthe music's intense inner purpose is the perpetual transformation of a tinymotif or 'cell', heard in the opening three notes, which in some guise,transposed, expanded, played 'vertically' (as harmony), is ever present. Thesecond piece is Schoenberg at his most speculative so fragmented, so hushed inits pianissimos
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
Peter Hill
Peter Hill
Peter Hill
Peter Hill
Peter Hill
Peter Hill
