Customer Reviews

Orchestral Works

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Sinopoli's renditions of these pieces are intense and passionate. Possibly less refined than Boulez in separating all the "strands" of polyphony ( though Sinopoli is by no means lax in that regard ), he and the wonderful Dresden orchestra bring more vitality and life to these masterpieces than most other performers. Also, the TELDEC recording is superb ( note that Maestro Sinopoli can be heard breathing with quite some excitement in some pieces ) as it is with other Sinopoli and Barenboim releases ( Berg, Bruckner ). Highly recommended for those who are looking for a more overt connection between Webern and the late ( or "post" ) romantic Austro-Germanic composers ( Bruckner,Mahler, Strauss, early Schoenberg ), these performances stress more of the link with the past than the ( Boulezian ) leap into the future.

Webern's "Symphony" (op. 21) is like light passing through a slowly revolving prism, revealing irridescent hues you've never seen before. Following his "Passacaglia" (op. 1), which clarifies but doesn't break with the Romanticism of Brahms, Webern composed 4 masterful orchestral miniatures. "6 Pieces" (op. 6) and "5 Pieces" (op. 10) are incredibly brief, in the atonal style pioneered by Webern's teacher Schoenberg. They met with quite different fates -- the "6 Pieces" provoked a "Le Sacre"-style riot at its Vienna premiere in 1913, and Webern fled into hiding. The "5 Pieces" wasn't publicly performed until 1924, at a festival in Zurich, 10 years after it was written. It was widely acclaimed, establishing Webern's international reputation. (Thanks to John Keillor for these details.) His masterpieces, in my opinion, are the serial works -- "Symphony" (op. 21) and "Variations" (op. 30). Despite their brevity (under 5 minutes and 7 minutes respectively), these are two of the greatest compositions of the 20th century. Webern here developed Schoenberg's 12 tone rows into something exquisite, far more beautiful than anything his teacher created. These works, along with the String Trio and Quartet (op. 20 and 28), became the main influence on the "Darmstadt School" of the 1950s (Boulez, Ligeti, Nono, Stockhausen, & co.).

This disc is one of two that collect Webern's orchestral works. While Sinopoli and the Staatskapelle Dresden are better recorded (with Teldec's signature sound!), I give Dohnanyi and Cleveland a slight edge in the interpretation. Dohnanyi achieves a smooth, homogenous texture, while Sinopoli creates wider dynamics and a greater separation of instruments. Dohnanyi's Webern is abstract, cold and restrained, while Sinopoli's Webern is more emotional, warmer and lusher by comparison, a reading that consciously emphasizes the continuity with Mahler. The two discs contain the same material, with one exception -- Dohnanyi includes Webern's arrangement of Bach's "Fuga Ricercata a 6," a fascinating exercise in pointillism, breaking the music into constituent cells. Sinopoli instead includes the "Concerto" (op. 24), a Bach-influenced composition from the same period. The Dohnanyi booklet contains a great photo of Webern, with a tragic expression absolutely apropos to the music, but the cover is a photo of Dohnanyi, following a tradition in classical music which I detest. The Sinopoli/Teldec booklet features instead a photo of a haunting nature sculpture by the British artist Andy Goldsworthy, and keeps the photo of Sinopoli inside, and so it wins the graphic design competition! (Sinopoli was recording a Second Vienna School series for Teldec before his tragic recent death. The other recordings, of works by Schoenberg and Berg, all feature stunning cover photos of Goldsworthy sculptures.)

These orchestral pieces are played in chronological order, so if you listen straight through you can hear the startling progression from the overripe Wagnerism of "Im Sommerwind" to the incredible compression of the late works, when Webern rations each note like a starving man trying to make a slice of bread last a whole week. Give this disc an hour of your time, and you can experience his entire creative arc.

The performances are not clinical and cold, as can easily be the case with this music. Rather, they are powerful, intense, and even upsetting. The scorching Passacaglia sounds like a late Mahler symphony compressed into 10 minutes of music. The other pieces remind you that Webern was living in the same city as Freud and Hitler. This is indispensable modern music; but its romantic roots are also made perfectly clear here.

Even 100 years after the musical revolution that set out to distance pure music from subjective excesses of the minds of Wagner, Bruckner, and Mahler to name a few, a revolution spearheaded by Schoenberg and Webern, many still think that the concept of atonality and the twelve tone disciplines arose de novo from composers who just could not bear to reach for the heart instead of the mind of listeners. But is gratifying to see an increase now in performances of the works of the penultimate gargantuan orchestras of the early works of the revolutionaries.

What Schoenberg accomplished in his gloriously romantic GURRELIEDER (and ERWARTUNG) Anton Webern equaled in IM SOMMERWIND and PASSACAGLIA. Here is the full orchestra pushed to extremes of expressivity that the result is almost unbearably beautiful. This particular recording conducted by the much missed Giuseppe Sinopoli with the Staatskapelle Dresden is as fine a recording of the works of Webern as can be found. The progression from the beauties of the first two works through the elegant SIX ORCHESTRAL PIECES and FIVE ORCHESTRAL PIECES to the final VARIATIONS makes such superb musical sense. The interpretations are sensitive, full-bodied, clear as crystal, and as emotionally touching in their minimalism as any works in the repertoire.

The engineering of this Teldec project is state of the art and makes us only regret that the proposed long-term recording project between Sinopoli and Dresden saw so few actual recordings. This is a modern masterpiece of a recording and deserves the attention of all serious music lovers. Highly Recommended! Grady Harp, March 2005

This splendid late recording of Sinopoli with the Dresden State Orchestra convincingly shows that both were comfortable giving intense, passionate performances of modern 20th Century music of which Webern's is among the definitive examples. These splendid performances show Webern's artistic ties to composers as diverse as Wagner and Mahler while being an apt pupil of Schoenberg. In stark contrast to Boulez's clinical interpretations, Sinopoli's are vibrant, passionate readings of these scores. I don't know whether his interpretations are not nearly as profound as Dohnanyi's with the Cleveland Orchestra, but his remain nonetheless an excellent introduction to Webern's orchestral music. I can't choose among any of these brief works and single them out for special praise; all seem quite vivid, fresh and compelling to listen. The sound quality is among the best I have heard for a recent Teldec recording.