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4.0 out of 5 stars
Romantic Webern?,
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This review is from: Conducts Webern 3 (Audio CD)
Yes, yes. Anton Webern (1883-1945) took the implications of the so-called Second Viennese School to their most radical conclusions, but like his teacher Arnold Schoenberg and his fellow Schoenberg-student Alban Berg, Webern remained in touch with the Mahlerian late-Romanticism of his youth. Even the gnomic Symphony, Opus 21 (1927) looks back to Mahler and makes (I believe) specific references to the Ninth Symphony. Consider the opening gestures of Webern's Symphony: We hear harp, strings, and horn - the very same combination in evidence in the first movement of Mahler's valedictory D-Minor Symphony. This is fin-de-siècle hyper-Romanticism glimpsed through the refractory lens of post-Hapsburg modernism. Webern originally planned four movements for his Symphony but typically left only two for posterity. Had he fulfilled his plan, the existing movements would probably make more sense than they do and indeed their underlying Romanticism might be clearer. Herbert von Karajan played this music very slowly, drawing the Symphony out to over a quarter of an hour, almost as if to lend it Mahlerian proportions. Boulez, of course, takes it faster, but he grasps the link with Mahler more clearly than von Karajan. I once heard Boulez lead a rehearsal of Mahler's Ninth, and he lavished a great deal of attention to the timbres of the opening bars of the First Movement. He finds those same timbres in the corresponding bars of Webern's score. Does it seem odd to speak of Webern's Romanticism? But one only has to look at the texts that he chose for his vocal and choral music, especially the mystical poems by Hildegard Jone, with their Hölderlinian fondness for nocturnal nature-imagery and lightning-like revelations of Being, as in "Das Augenblick": "O sea of glances with its surf of tears... When the night of your eyelids silently descends / upon your depths, your waters wash / against those of death." Not even the "French" interpretations of Boulez can hide this. In fact, as they bring out the convergence of Webernian minimalism with Debussy's late style, also an outgrowth of Romanticism, they reinforce the intuition. This is the best Webern anthology ever, with crisp, luminous playing from the Berlin Philharmonic, beautifully recorded. Despite Boulez's reputation for uncompromising Cartesian coldness, what we have here is Webern the sensualist, Webern the mystic, Webern the devotee of Mahler. Of the Big Three atonalists, Webern is the least intimidating and Boulez makes for him a very user-friendly case.
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Tonic for Your Ears,
By
This review is from: Conducts Webern 3 (Audio CD)
If you have not encountered Webern's music before, then I would suggest that you start with Boulez Conducts Webern II. But if you have already purchased that disk, or encountered Webern via another route, then you might want to give this disk a listen. What can make this disk a tough one for the first-time listener is what Webern does with voices--it is one thing to hear brass or strings jumping around from note to note, but to hear the human voice do so can be a bit of a shock. But if you can get past that initial shock and listen to these pieces a few times, you might begin to find them quite bracing and refreshing, a real tonic for your ears. Boulez is an old hand at conducting this kind of stuff, and the DG "4D" sound is quite good. No, I am not recommending this CD to everyone, but for the musically adventurous, I am recommending it in light of the caveats I outlined above.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Webern's mature masterpieces in wonderful performance and sound, but just get the box set,
This review is from: Conducts Webern 3 (Audio CD)
Pierre Boulez's Webern cycle on Deutsche Grammophon through the 1990s surpassed his early Sony recordings by covering more of the composer's oeuvre. However, you probably want to just get the Complete Webern box set instead of collecting these individual discs. On this one, Boulez leads the Berlin Philharmonic, with some major talent (singers Gerald Finley Christiane Oelze).
The best works here are all respresentative of Webern's mature period, when he turned his teacher Arnold Schoenberg's 12-tone technique to mystical ends. The two Cantatas are complementary to each other. The Cantata No. 1 op. 29 (1938-39) is extrovert, full of sudden explosions, joyful solo singing and grand choral passages. The larger Cantata No. 2 op. 31 (1941-42) is more restrained, with a slow tempo and a general sense of doom. "Das Augenlicht" op. 26 for chorus and orchestra (1935) is very similar, but is a bit immature compared to the cantatas, with a sense of lack of direction over its 5-minute length. These vocal works all set Hildegard Jone, a minor German poet who made a major impact on Webern's life and work. The Symphony op. 21 (1928) is probably Webern's masterpiece. Its two movements add up to a mere nine minutes, and the scoring is exceedingly limited, but nonetheless one gets a sense of grand designs compressed. The piece unfolds first as a series of canons and then as a theme and variations. In a work of twelve-tone serialism, however, such constructions sound quite different from the tradition. Other conductors have tackled the Symphony, and there's even a bizarre recording by Karajan, but only Boulez perfectly balances the textures to reveal Webern's stunning architecture. The Variations for Orchestra op. 30 (1940) is a piece less elegant in construction but more varied in timbres. I like the little flurries in the violins towards the end. Boulez's DG Webern cycle included a good amount of juvenalia as well, and two works left without opus numbers are present here. The Three Orchestral Songs (1913-14) The Five Pieces for orchestra (1913), not to be confused with Webern's op. 10 of the same title, display Webern's characteristic brevity, but not too much of his crystalline perfection, being done before he adopted the 12-tone technique.
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