Customer Reviews

Berg: Lyric Suite; Violin Concerto; Lulu-Suite

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Another big winner from EMI's double CD reissues!--even more remarkable that they should release this fine set of the esoteric New Viennese Berg.

Set features most of Berg's larger works with splendid artists: Simon Rattle, Sabine Meyer, Arleen Augér, the Alban Berg Quartet, etc.

Can't go wrong here: great Art, nice price.

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EMI is endlessly repackaging and reissuing its extensive back catalog. This 2007 Gemini set of Berg looks at first glance to have the same content as the 2011 20th Century Classics set of Berg. But closer inspection reveals a crucial substitution: the new 20th Century Classics set includes BOTH of Berg's string quartets, performed by the Alban Berg Quartett, while this 2007 set only includes the "Lyric Suite." Instead of the "String Quartet (Op. 3)," it has an orchestral excerpt from "Wozzeck" (1921) and the "Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano" (1913). So for most listeners, the new 20th Century Classics set is the one to get.

For anyone just investigating the music of Alban Berg (1885-1935), this set does a good job of providing an overview of orchestral and chamber works by one of the Second Vienna School composers, Arnold Schoenberg and his students Berg, Anton Webern and Hanns Eisler. Just not quite as good a job as the 2011 set.

This first disc features all orchestral music. The "Violin Concerto" is one of Berg's best-known and best-loved works. This is a perfectly good performance and recording, but to hear the full emotional depth of the piece, Anne-Sophie Mutter's 1992 recording with James Levine and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, which takes it much slower, is unmatched. Rattle's "Lulu-Suite" is excellently done, but I prefer the 1970s recording by Boulez with the New York Philharmonic (see my review), with a faster tempo, greater clarity and dynamics, and not surprisingly, a more modern sound as compared to Rattle's more Romantic interpretation. Likewise Metzmacher's "Three Orchestral Pieces" is fine, but does not equal the earlier recordings by Boulez or Levine with the Berlin Philharmonic. Berg was Schoenberg's student, but leaned back toward Mahler's late Romanticism, and the "Three Orchestral Pieces" demonstrates this as well as any Berg composition.

The second disc includes the Alban Berg Quartett's 1991 recording of the "Lyric Suite" of 1925-6, with its hidden theme of forbidden love, along with the "Piano Sonata (Op. 1)," "Seven Early Songs," and the little "Wozzeck" extract. The ABQ's Berg quartets are among the finest recorded, it's just a shame this set doesn't include both. (Other excellent recordings have been made by the LaSalle Quartet, the Schoenberg Quartett, the Arditti Quartet, and the Kronos Quartet.)

I would recommend hearing "Wozzeck" in its entirety. (Sony has just reissued a budget version of a great Boulez recording.) And so unless you are specifically looking for this particular live recording of the "Four Pieces for Clarinet and Piano," the 2011 20th Century Classics set is the way to go.