Customer Reviews

Berg: Chamber Concerto / Stravinsky: 'Dumbarton Oaks' Concerto

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If you're one of those who, like me, find Berg a little bit too luscious, too late-19th-century-ish, this work will probably surprise and delight you. It is known as his most Schoenbergian work, which may be the reason why it is less known than for example the violin concerto, and which also accounts for the unusually lucid textures and relatively detached treatment of the wonderfully inspired musical material. The coolness of this masterpiece renders Berg's romanticism more impressive than in his other works, I think. It is also said to be based on various games with the number three, alluding to the trinitry of Second Viennese School. Stravinsky is as energetic, witty and masterful as we know him in the concerto and eight miniatures, each a masterpiece. Overall, a magnificient disk. Nobody interested in modern music should miss it.

An impressive recording, but the notes accompanying the recording are not only misleading but downright erroneous. Stravinsky wrote Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman, not Benny Goodman. In fact, Woody Herman and the First Herd performed the world premier of Ebony Concerto at Carnegie Hall on March 25, 1946. A fragment of that first performance is avaiable on CD...

When the Rite of Spring was premiered shortly before WW1 there was a bad-mannered riot in the theatre. 90 years later Stravinsky does not seem much more radical than Brahms, and I was surprised to see that all 3 of the Stravinsky items here are later in date than Berg's Chamber Concerto. Assuming then that Stravinsky is a fully accepted classic these days, maybe I can use his comparative popularity to do my little bit towards 'popularising' Berg, or at least reducing the level of antipathy and indifference to him. In the last resort if you still find you can't put up with him, you will always have a very good set of Stravinsky performances at a very reasonable price.

Persuading people to listen to Berg is not helped by supercilious remarks by Boulez that he is 'of course very romantic' or words to that effect. He is quite obviously not romantic in the way Strauss or Elgar are romantic, and I do not necessarily acquit Boulez of pseudism and affectation in talking like this. I guess that most people getting to know Berg start with the violin concerto which can, at a stretch, be called romantic in the familiar sense. For the chamber concerto this takes a bigger stretch, but I can still hear Brahms in it. What its idiom resembles is Schoenberg's two chamber symphonies, firmly across the 12-tone rubicon and full of the squawking effects that characterise the second Viennese school but not totally uncompromising like Schoenberg's concertos. In my diet I couldn't live indefinitely on 'nice' flavours, and in my musical diet, while I always tend to be a bit suspicious of fashionable cacophony, I couldn't take myself seriously as even an amateur musician if I were totally deaf to Berg and Schoenberg. If you like Stravinsky and buy this record you will not have wasted your money. If the Berg chamber concerto succeeds in interesting you in the second Viennese school, a good next step into that territory would be either his violin concerto (I recommend Perlman) or Schoenberg's chamber symphonies in the Holliger recording.

This Deutsche Grammophon CD collects some of the first recordings that the Ensemble Intercontemporain put down after its founding in the mid-1970s, linked to the IRCAM music and acoustics research laboratory. Their first director, Pierre Boulez, leads them in pieces by two very different modernists, Alban Berg and Igor Stravinsky.

Berg's three-movement "Chamber Concerto" for violin, piano and 13 wind instruments was written between 1923 and 1925 and shows a mastery of the 12-tone method. The first movement begins with a brief little motto incorporating the names of his friends Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern, and then proceeds through a series of variations. For the most part, this sounds like an especially zany Mahler, and Berg's Viennese heritage is especially evident in the langsamer Walztempo. The second movement is an Adagio, much more tranquil than the first both in its slower tempo and its reduced scoring as the piano mainly sits out. The last movement is a round that subjects a succession of different melodies to the same rhythms. As this is an IRCAM recording, in terms of sound quality it is very much superior to Boulez's earlier recording of the piece with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. However, it's a pity that the first movement is just one big track, since that earlier CBS/Sony recording had each variation on a separate track, letting the listener grasp more easily the structure of the piece.

Before I got this record, I knew Igor Stravinsky only as the bad-boy modernist composer who created "The Rite of Spring". This disc served as my introduction to his neoclassical period. Imagine my surprise upon playing the Concerto in E flat "Dunbarton Oaks" (1938) to hear such square rhythms and traditional form. Indeed, the concerto was written at a time when Stravinsky was closely studying Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. However, like the solo bassoon opening of the "Rite", Stravinsky could create modernist effects through mere instrumentation, and indeed we find here an orchestration that would have been inconceivable prior to the 20th century. If anything else, the farting tones look forward to the work of Hans Werner Henze.

In the "Ebony Concerto" for clarinet and jazz band (1945), the variety of novel rhythms with which Stravinsky made his name return. This was written for bandleader Woody Herman (clarinettist Michel Arrignon performs here), but it's much more than the sort of 1940s faux-jazz for white people that you might expect. I like its virtuoso demands and its immense variety over its 8-minute length. The "Eight Instrument Miniatures" (1963) is an orchestration of the piano work "Les cinq doigt" from over forty years before. Again, DG has put the entire work into one single DG track, but the whole work is just 8 minutes long, and so it isn't too much of a hassle to just listen to it straight through. These are mainly tame neoclassical ditties, but entertaining enough, and the eerie one where a harp plucks out a cadence among swirling orchestral textures is sure to charm.

I love Berg's chamber concerto and think it deserves more attention from the general concert-going public, who would hardly think anything about a 12-tone construction in it unless you told them. And Stravinsky's compositions here, while not music I'm uber-passionate amount, still gives much delight. A good disc for fans of modern music.

Uplifitng Berg? Why not? Boulez brings just the opposite of what one expects from his ultra-French, ultra-aloof Ensemble Intercomptemporain. Instead of sounding abstract, offering mere exercises in musical mathematics, I felt warmly drawn to the two main works here, Berg's Chamber Concerto and Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks, a chamber conerto of another stripe (neo-classical and jittery as compared to 12-tone and complexly woven). The Stravinsky proceeds as delicately as a minuet at court, and the Berg shows off the composer's love of collage (marches, waltzes, and flok dances are thrown in slyly) and his romantic roots.

In other words, even though it will be to taste if you like the Second Viennese School, even at its least aggressive and scratchy, Boulez and company do their best not to make you run away.

I've never heard a "classical" composer sound like this. Some of the dissonances and just plain musical weirdness of Berg and Stravinsky make this CD impossible to resist. Stravinsky's "Ebony Concerto" is delightful. You can tell that he totally understands the musical concept of black jazz, but because he's Russian, gives us an entirely new slant on the music! I can't believe it's the same guy who wrote "The Rite of Spring" (another piece I love!). I'm not really an expert on classical music (I've only been listening for about a year, in fact), but I know good music when I hear it! And if you like to be adventurous once in a while and try something really bold, brave, and new, give this CD, and these great composers a shot! You won't be disappointed!

I don't know why these composers are paired on cd's so much. Their compositions, the structures of their compositions, their compositional visions, are so different. But this is wonderful music. I am sure this is the best recording you can get for these pieces.