Arnold Schoenberg; Anton Webern - Orchestral Works (Heinz Holliger)

Information

Composer: Arnold Schoenberg; Anton Webern

• Schoenberg - Kammersymphonie No. 1, Op. 9
• Webern - Symphonie, Op. 21
• Schoenberg - Sechs Kleine Stücke, Op. 19 (arr. Heinz Holliger)
• Webern - Funf Sätze, Op. 5

Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne

Heinz Holliger, conductor

Date: 2022

Label: Fuga Libera

https://outhere-music.com/en/albums/schonberg-kammersymphonie-op-9-sechs-kleine-stucke-op-19-arr-holliger-webern-symphonie-op-21

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Review

The key works of early 20th-century modernism can often seem as challenging today as one imagines they were when new. Take Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony (1906), clinging to the remnants of tonality as its single-movement compression of symphonic design drives inexorably through extremes of aggressiveness and nostalgia, resisting Mahlerian expansiveness and Straussian opulence alike in its quest for a personal tone of voice. Just three years later, in his Five Movements for string quartet, Op 5, Schoenberg’s pupil Webern moved even more decisively away from traditional ideas about form and texture and into the brave new world of musical expressionism. Not until 1928 would Webern feel confident enough to use a traditional title for an orchestral work, but that simply underlines the determined radicalism of calling a brief, predominantly reticent two-movement composition ‘Symphony’.

It is typical of Heinz Holliger’s thoughtful approach to post-tonal music (as palpable in his conducting as in his composing) that the pairing of two such different symphonies should reinforce the complementary strengths of both. Earlier recordings of Schoenberg’s Op 9 often revel in the almost hysterical exuberance of this hyper-turbulent score. But the sustained precision and textural clarity of this new version (recorded with a dryish acoustic that promotes maximum attention to detail) brilliantly convey the seriousness of Schoenberg’s deeply conflicted rethinking of the epic symphonic style favoured by his more traditional contemporaries. Heard alongside it, the elusive fragments of Webern’s Symphony, Op 21 – more ethereal than epic – could easily sound desultory. But Holliger and his players preserve the rhythmic spine of the music’s delicate polyphony as expertly as Pierre Boulez and a few others have managed before them, and there is a similar balance of insistence and flexibility in this account of Webern’s own transcription of Op 5 for string orchestra. Here, too, nothing of the epic remains, and some kind of tragic subtext seems inescapable.

Finally, there is a hint of Holliger the composer in his instrumentation of Schoenberg’s uncharacteristically tiny set of six piano pieces, Op 19. If we assume that Schoenberg calculated the precise effect of the music’s many contrasts of texture and shifts of mood to suit the keyboard’s monochrome qualities, such an arrangement as this, with its flecks of percussion and harp, might be held to miss the point. But Op 19, ending with a hushed echo of the funereal bells associated with Mahler’s recent death, could never be mistaken for typical Schoenberg, and in Holliger’s hands it begins to sound even more like Webern than the original does. On this admirable recording, hearing Op 19 in close proximity to the infinitely sorrowful ending of Webern’s own Op 5 strongly supports the assumption that both composers were responding to an ever-growing conviction that the new music they were pioneering would never match the old music (or its contemporary equivalents) in popularity and positive feelings. More than a century later, it seems they were right.

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone

More reviews:

https://www.classical-music.com/reviews/orchestral/schoenberg-webern-symphony-op-21-etc

https://artmusiclounge.wordpress.com/2022/06/07/holliger-conducts-schoenberg-webern/

https://www.allmusic.com/album/schoenberg-kammersymphonie-op-9-sechs-kleine-st%C3%BCcke-op-19-webern-symphonie-op-21-f%C3%BCnf-s%C3%A4tze-op-5-mw0003713847

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Arnold Schoenberg (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian composer. Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in atonality that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. Mentoring Anton Webern and Alban Berg, he became the central figure of the Second Viennese School. In the 1920s, he developed the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg

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Anton Webern (3 December 1883 – 15 September 1945) was an Austrian composer and conductor. He studied composition under Arnold Schoenberg, and met Alban Berg at the Vienna University. Along with his mentor Schoenberg and his colleague Berg, Webern was at the core among those within and more peripheral to the circle of the Second Viennese School, including Ernst Krenek and Theodor W. Adorno. Webern's music was among the most radical of its milieu, both in its concision and in its rigorous and resolute apprehension of twelve-tone technique. Thirty-one of his compositions were published in composer's lifetime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Webern

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Heinz Holliger (born 21 May 1939 in Langenthal, Switzerland) is a Swiss oboist, composer and conductor. He began his musical education at the conservatories of Bern and Basel, studying composition with Sándor Veress and Pierre Boulez. Since the International Competition in Geneva in 1959 where he was awarded first prize for oboe, Holliger has become one of the world's most celebrated oboists, and many composers have written works for him. Holliger has also composed many works in a variety of media. Many of his works have been recorded for the ECM label.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinz_Holliger

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