Customer Reviews

Schoenberg: Pelleas Und Melisande Op. 5 / Variationen Op. 31

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Pelleas & Melisande is rarely recorded or heard, but is an interesting piece nonetheless. It betrays Schoenberg's roots in Strauss and Wagner, yet it certainly has distinctive touches to it. As one would expect, Boulez gives a controlled and slightly cool performance. The Variations are one of Schoenberg's greatest pieces. They are the result of his synthesis of twelve-tone technique and the lyricism which he achieved late in life. Again, Boulez is restrained, though with more emotion than he sometimes brings to the more abstract pieces by the memebers of the second Viennese school.

Most people associate Schoenberg with twelve-tone composition and atonalism, but Schoenberg originally followed the tradition of Wagner, Strauss, and Mahler. Palleas und Melisande is a staggering late-Romantic tone poem, completely accessible to the ear, and deeply expressive. One cannot understand the real Schoenberg without hearing Palleas and also his Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night). These pieces prove that Schoenberg was a skilled Romanticist who didn't hide behind atonality out of laziness, but who truly believed it was the way forward in serious music. (Of course, he was wrong on that one.) This is a stunning performance by the Chicago Symphony, perhaps a little cool at the edges in the hands of Pierre Boulez, but certainly an important recording and very much worthwhile.

'Pelleas und Melissande Op. 5' by Arnold Schoenberg, performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Mr. Modern Music, Pierre Boulez, is a very, very nice piece. It is interesting to see in the notes that Schoenberg originally intended to do it as an opera, as the piece does sound very dramatic, similar to many of the ballets done around the same time by Ravel and even similar to Mendelsohn's incidental music for Shakespeare's 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'.

While the music is definitely '20th Century', it does not sound far from its late 19th century roots in Wagner and Strauss.

Very nice listening.