Arnold Schoenberg; Sándor Veress; Béla Bartók - Verklärte Nacht (Thomas Zehetmair)

Information

Composer: Arnold Schoenberg; Sándor Veress; Béla Bartók

• Schoenberg - Transfigured Night, Op. 4
• Veress - Four Transylvanian Dances
• Bartók - Divertimento

Camerata Bern

Thomas Zehetmair, conductor

Date: 2001

Label: ECM

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Review

The closest musical relationship here is between Bartok and his piano student Sandor Veress, especially in the last of Veress’s Transylvanian Dances, which drives a rhythmic course somewhere between the finales of Bartok’s Fourth Quartet and Divertimento. The second Dance is a sort of Magyar fugue, and the third an eerie tension-builder that slowly rises in temperature before lightening up and exiting on the tail of a skittish folk dance. In a sense, one might think in terms of a Hungarian half-cousin to Barber’s similarly intense Adagio.

Thomas Zehetmair showed us his Bartokian mettle a few years ago when he recorded Bartok’s Violin Concertos for Berlin Classics (under Ivan Fischer), and his Camerata Bern account of the Divertimento is similarly perceptive. Flexibility of tempo, thoughtful balancing between full and solo strings (tutti and ripieno in the old concerto grosso sense) and a keen, though never rigid, handling of rhythm – all are part of his canny interpretative ground plan. Listen to how, from around 3'45 into the first movement, he traces the rising progression from cello and viola through to violin (a telling detail that few rivals notice) or to how he controls the ghostly chorus that closes in from 3'36 into the Adagio. Everyone is evidently listening to everyone else, which means that inner voices really glow, and the amply sonorous recording captures them all.

Given a choice, I would have preferred some Janacek, Martinu, Stravinsky or Bloch to yet another version of Verklarte Nacht. The hapless offspring of that angst-ridden couple have since multiplied without restraint, spawning a plethora of late-romantic soundalikes. Schoenberg’s fledgling style was the stuff of Hollywood’s musical future, and although there’s a good deal more to Verklarte Nacht than that, couldn’t we have had, say, the Suite for Strings instead? In the event, Zehetmair eschews schmaltz for chaste dialoguing, clean articulation and a generous quota of drama. Rarely has Schoenberg’s night transfigured to fewer tears or stranger sounds, especially the chilling sul ponticello at 16'29. Cut-glass tremolandos and stylised phrasing are characteristic: indeed, I can imagine that Nikolaus Harnoncourt might handle the piece in a similar fashion (if he ever conducts it). In terms of texture, Zehetmair effects a fine compromise between the full string version and the sextet original. Lovers of musical heavy petting might miss coagulating string lines and intrusive vibrato (if I may allude to one or two illustrious rivals), but give me Zehetmair’s leanness any day. Again, the sound is superb

— Gramophone

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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.

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Sándor Veress (1 February 1907 – 4 March 1992) was a Swiss composer of Hungarian origin. Born in Klausenburg, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Cluj-Napoca, Romania), he studied and later taught at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. Among his teachers were Zoltán Kodály, with whom he studied composition, and Béla Bartók, with whom he studied piano. Among the composers who studied under him are György Ligeti, György Kurtág and Heinz Holliger. As a composer, Veress wrote numerous chamber music pieces and symphonic works, as well as an opera named Hangjegyek lázadása (1931).

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Béla Bartók (25 March 1881 – 26 September 1945) was a Hungarian composer, pianist and ethnomusicologist who is considered one of the most important composers of the 20th century. As an ethnomusicologist, his fieldwork with the composer Zoltán Kodály formed the basis for all later research in the field. Bartók employed folk themes and rhythms into his own music, achieving a style that was nationalistic and deeply personal. His notable works include the opera Bluebeard's Castle (1911), 6 string quartets (1908–39), the Mikrokosmos piano set, Concerto for Orchestra (1943), and 3 piano concertos (1926, 1931 & 1945).

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Thomas Zehetmair (born 23 November 1961) is an Austrian violinist and conductor. He was born in Salzburg, studied at the Salzburg Mozarteum, and attended master classes with Nathan Milstein and Max Rostal. In 1994, Zehetmair formed a string quartet which bears his name with which he has made several recordings. Zehetmair's conducting career includes leadership roles with the Royal Northern Sinfonia (2002–2014), Orchester Musikkollegium Winterthur (2016–2021), and the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra (since 2019). His extensive and varied discography won him a Midem Classic Award and three Gramophone Awards.

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