Customer Reviews

Schoenberg: Piano Concerto

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Alfred Brendel has done three recordings of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, and I own two of them (the DG one with Kubelik and the much later one on Philips, the latter nla). I previously thought Brendel's latest recording (with Gielen at the podium) to be the last word concerning this concerto, but I was wrong. Uchida and Boulez are much more fiery, employing a very wide spectrum of dynamics and articulation (which Schoenberg's scores demand). I thought the first movement was a bit sluggish at first, but it works beautifully, and the more contrapuntal variations are more clearly focussed because of the added spaciousness (though not even Boulez's legenday ear could clarify the very thick textures of some passages). The second movement has a greater sense of angst and conflict than Brendel and Gielen, and the third movement more pain. Brendel and Gielen are more playfully nonchalant in the last movement. Uchida and Boulez seem to portray the movement as having an eerie undurcurrent, as if the troubles of the second and third movements are still kept in mind.

The solo piano items are also very good, though I have some reservations. It surprises me that Uchida executes a crescendo instead of the printed decrscendo in one passage of Op. 11 No. 1 (Uchida is usually very faithful to the score). But Op. 11 No. 3 is incredibly intense, more so than the recordings by Gould or Pollini (though Pollini's recording is on the whole very good). Op. 19 is performed with utmost sensitivity and warmth -- the bells of the last piece are exquisitely voiced and controlled. Webern's Variations are also warmly expressive -- the third movement's closing variation seems to disappear into the ether (as it should), but the second movement is rather slow, diminshing the sense of manic energy that it should have. Uchida's performance of Berg's Sonata is one of the finest ever recorded. She takes Berg's numerous tempo changes to heart and follows them more closely than any other recording I've listened to (compare Pollini, for example). The result is very intense yet also very coherent, as it should be.

Those of you who love these works (as I do) should not hesitate. This is the best recording of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto so far.

A little perspective: I am a 21-year old pianist who has made it his obligation in the past couple of years to thoroughly internalize Schoenberg's Op. 11 and 19, both of which are found on this CD. I am a stickler for following every little marking Schoenberg wrote, but I see a lot of room for creativity, too. My reference recordings have been those of Charles Rosen and Maurizio Pollini, both of which I hold in high esteem for their clean precision and abstract imagery. For the Berg sonata, I am partial to Maria Yudina's exuberant (and hard to find) recording. For the Webern variations, Richter's live performance in Vienna is my favorite. The Concerto is new to me, but I pulled out some recordings from the library to compare it to - Gould, Brendel, Ax, Peter Serkin.

Besides this disc, I have also heard Uchida albums of Schubert, Debussy, Mozart, and Chopin. I find that her playing tends to be dark-hued, dimly lit and compellingly non-intuitive, with an amazing command of passages calling for gossamer textures. She can also use impossibly slow tempi at times, coming up with conceptions so expansive that you can stick your head in between the notes. Both of those qualities make her Schoenberg Op. 19 quite different from the others I've heard, but the concept of space is the more striking and memorable. Uchida seems to be convinced that it is the silences in these tiny pieces that gives them their meaning, and long ritards to silence mark almost every bar. Yet the pieces never fall apart, because this is entirely in their character. It's a free interpretation, to be sure, and not one which is 100% faithful, but it's highly sympathetic and quite effective.

Her Op. 11 is more conventionally beautiful, and it's also easily the best I've heard. Never mind the fact that Uchida's hands could never actually span the gigantic chords in the third piece - the editing job is seamless and the musical content is what's important. These readings are far more humane than those of the ferocious Pollini, and the Romantic warmth bleeds through even though the sound is not plush. The influence of Brahms on Schoenberg can clearly be heard through this truly stellar reading.

The Berg Sonata is merely good. There are some beautiful moments and there is some real tension here, but Uchida seems to see this as a conventional sonata-allegro movement packing a few extra pounds around the middle, and that's exactly how it comes off. The Mahlerian drama is muted - I think it takes someone as incandescantly insane as Maria Yudina to really do it justice. Uchida certainly follows Berg's markings more closely than Yudina does, but they're not well enough internalized and so they don't have the effect that they should have.

The Webern is a welcome addition. Too many recordings of Webern have an excessive cleanliness to them which makes them alienating and creepy. This, on the other hand, is warm in the same way that Uchida's Schoenberg Op. 11 is, imbuing this fragmentary, elusive music with a real soul.

The Concerto is the most complex piece on the album, and this performance, by Uchida at the piano with Boulez conducting the Cleveland Orchestra, is the hardest for me to judge. No doubt that it is fearsomely difficult to play, and she does a fantastic job. Every page bristles with new and different difficulties, but these are not merely pianistic bells and whistles like you hear in Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev. The importance Schoenberg puts on each awkwardly placed note makes this piece doubly difficult to execute. Uchida's overall conception is smooth and highly intelligible, with a fantastic sound. The only thing it really lacks is style. The Haydn-esque finale is rather flat compared with any of the other major recordings, such as Gould or Brendel just to name a couple. Although the form is there, the spark of life is a bit weak. Nonetheless this is a high-quality recording.

There is much to recommend this CD, and there is more than enough original contribution here to merit a listen by anyone interested in the Second Viennese School. Go pick it up!

If you're a fan of Schoenberg in general, or the piano concerto in particular, there is no need to hesitate with this wonderful recording. This may be my favorite 20th century piece and it's certainly the version I like best. Previously my top contender (now sadly out of print) was Pollini with Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic. It is another great version worth hearing, my only real complaint there being that you can hear the numerous edits where they cut and pasted the performance together. That problem does not exist here with Boulez and Uchida. The piano concerto is a dense, contrapuntal work and Boulez makes sure that none of the parts get lost. Uchida's playing is superb, concise yet emotional. The Cleveland Orchestra shows no strain even in this works difficult passages. The only thing that strikes me negatively about this Uchida/Boulez version is that the second movement seems a bit fast to me but it works.

For those who are not yet fans of Schoenberg, this is a great place to start. I see the piano concerto as the highlight of Schoenberg's 12-tone output, though some would argue for Variations for Orchestra, op. 31. What attracts me to his music is that Schoenberg, more than being the post-Romantic composer evident in his first ten tonal published works, is really a "hyper"-Romantic. Bigger than life, rich orchestrations, sweeping melodies and thick harmony. And though he has the firmest command of music theory, structure, etc., it is the emotional impact of this piece that really shines through for me. By using 12-tone harmony he is able to change moods on a dime and can express horror and delight in ways tonal music cannot.

In addition to the concerto you get hear his first atonal piece, a great op. 11, the short but wonderful op. 19, and the two main solo piano works of his well-known students Webern and Berg. The Webern is a masterwork in balance and is fantastic here. I now own two copies of the Berg and it still doesn't strike me, but perhaps in time.

This is a great cd.

I entirely agree with the previous reviewer. I can't talk about this music technically. What I do like about the dodecaphonic music of Schoenberg (and Berg and Webern) is, unlike music written strictly in keys, the feeling of gliding with it across variations of a landscape and touching down at times to take another stride. This piece was my accidental introduction to serial music and I have returned to it over decades to discover why and how it so transfixed me. I drifted from recording to recording until I realized the glide and stride of the experience. To my mind after years of reading about what goes on in serial music, those touch-downs must be those places where my ear hears tonal moments--after all, how can it not? And then striding, gliding, dancing with Ms Uchida in partnership with the orchestra across mosiacally shifting impressions, at times poignant and dolorous, at others charming, ebullient and delightful, as wines can sometimes be. It doesn't leave one humming, nor does one finally, entirely touch-down. Not an objective or technical appraisal, but pleasure, sometimes, is a knowledge difficult to withold--and articulate.

For those who bask in the romantic warmth of Mitsuko Uchida's Schubert, Beethoven and Schumann or marvel at the clarity and finesse of her Mozart, this recording will remind all that the fiendishly difficult Schoenberg Piano Concerto Opus 42 is one work that she owns. She is able to find the arching lines within the myriad notes and remind us that the genius of the twelve tone music also gave us 'Gurrelieder' and 'Verklarte Nacht'! Uchida, in perfect synchrony and vision with Pierre Boulez and the Cleveland Orchestra, offers the most brilliant reading of this great concerto on recording!

To round out the recital Uchida stays respectfully within the framework of the 'modern' sound by electing to offer two sets of Schoenberg's piano works: Pieces for Piano Opus 11 and Little Pieces for Piano Opus 19. These complex works are lovingly performed with precision and delicacy. Berg's Piano Sonata Opus 1 and Webern's Variations for Piano Opus 27 complete these echt Viennese school of music in performances that rival the finest.
Highly recommended. Grady Harp, January 06

I'm not familiar with Brendel's Schoenberg "Piano Concerto", but Boulez has a special vision for Schoenberg. Listen to his "Moses and Aaron", sharp, cleanly impassioned, razor-sharp edges, provincial the way Bach is played, purely functional, unadorned phrases, and musical shapes. Uchida as well brings a controlled passion to the work, not compromising the work's content in any way. In fact that is a dangerous trap of over-determining Schoenberg, especially the music he wrote in exile, as this Concerto. The darkest clouds of Europa and the globe all around art and the humanity in many ways is inside this work. Schoenberg had renewed his interest in Judaism, where some actually criticized him for doing so,coming back to the fold too late, after living a life of assimilation. Most German Jews considered themselves German first, Jews second until of they were montrously betrayed. All this history is not insignificant and has direct bearing on the work, this Concerto,to experience it from this perspective, of a man in confusion, where he has literally not much to say anymore,certainly dodecaphonic innovation is over, he could not even complete his "Moses and Aaron", did not find a solution to it.Now relying on tried and tested musical genres, known shapes to hide within, to escape to this comfort zone of tradition. The criticism against Schoenberg, by Judaic scholars is all predictably in retrospect, having the luxury of gazing comfortably backwards, retrogressively. Put yourselves in his place and then see how to respond, or not respond. He was firstly an artist, with a composer's temperment hardly the strength for politics, that he also had little capacity for and came too late. There are retrogressive elements in this Concerto, the abandonment and fulfillment of hope for humanity. Uchida and Boulez certainly comprehend this, with there functionally straight empowered reading.Boulez knows just how to balance chords while rendering rhythmic force impeccably, always moving forward aggresively to mount a trajectory for snarling trombones, and screeching wistful strings, industrial-like wind chords, with the soloist,quite independent,pummeling the piano's resonance; pondering questions, going- gesturing forward in thought.

Uchida's solo Schoenberg I found more problematical.I have lived with Glenn Gould first then Pollini as a lifeworld. She does not have the emotive reserve of Pollini, (and I haven't heard Richter who had played the Webern "Variations" in Vienna.) Uchida goes after the music much of the time and makes it strong where it needed be. You can hide these excursions within the Schoenberg where if you have Brahms within your conception of timbre and shape of phrase in your field of vision, it may work,The late Sir Georg Solti also played Schoenberg within a Brahms-perspective. This works, but it is too predictable an approach and creates listening pleasure but little excitement.And the expressionist orchestration gets pummeled and made one-dimensional. I prefer leaner,more Bach-like dimensions of timbre in Schoenberg, where the exposed contrapuntal shapes of his music become empowered by the modern orchestration.Boulez certainly does this consistently.

The fact that Schoenberg did not understand the resonance of the piano, attests to his genius, for this Opus 11 resonance is incredibly powerful dark, and penumbral, raw at times, unfinished at times, and ponderous. Provincial block-chordal accompaniment is what I mean here, nothing adorned, although Schoenberg had his own means of adornment, with broken chords in thirds, and fourth-chords. She does much better with the "Six Short Pieces",allowing the short shards,particles and fragments of timbre,to speak for themselves, something the next generation certainly listened to these more than any other Schoenberg. Miniatures you cannot deal with roughly, you need to simply state the materials and the discourse has ended.

The Webern "Variations" has more problems for me perhaps not for Uchida,who again makes heavy,makes strident, makes noises where there needed be, as in the fist movement. It is also too slow, for the reoccuring mirror two-sixteenths shapes,minor ninths and major sevenths become forgotten if slowed at the tempo she plays them. You need to comprehend the emotive arc, the durational agenda of the entire work as it is perhaps one single movement. The Third movement also made less sense to me, the structures were not a-matter-of-factly played. Webern should have some refined mystery to it,yet not indulgent with some sense of a private world, introspective looking, for an inner life. This was all that was left in Nazi Germany. Ffreedom existed,only within oneself in private realms of thought and discourse, the way the current Leipzig Painters render a private(romanticized) lifeworld today unexplainable,opaque yet filled with icons and places for contemplation with history past, and where it has past them by without explanation.

The Berg Sonata had even more problems,again this Sonata works by understatement, withoutrelative authority,or overwhelming conviction, the quasi-tonal meanderings have more interest when not fitted within the Bach-like frames we previously experienced.Berg then has some mystery to it. He was the most lyrical and backward looking philososphically of these Vienna composers. Trying to make this modest piano solo sound rotund,larger than it already is not and taking on larger dimensions does not work in Berg. His entire life he favored, had an affinity for the chamber realm, even in his two innovative operas, the orchestra is treated at its most effective, when reduced down to chamber projections of accompaniment again with strict variations and sonata forms chamber-ized, fragmenting timbres down to short shapes and sizes for contemplation. Granted, the "Piano Sonata" Opus one is an early work without structural sophistication,nor the intervallic meanderings of his later music,but the Berg aesthetic is there.

I should think more about Uchida's Second Viennese readings, she is a powerful lady, with an intellect of depth and persuasion, with a comprehensive performative constitution. It needs another thought after some time perhaps.

The first recording I heard of the Schoenberg concerto was the live Glenn Gould performance with the CBC Symphony (a great recording, despite drastic ensemble problems). Ever since then, all performances were a let down, until this one was released. Uchida gives a very intelligent performance of the piece, showing more clearly than in any other performance I've heard, the great emotional depth and romantic quality of the music. The difference is clear right from the beginning, when she unifies the opening piano solo into one coherent, beautiful thought. And the quality of sound is far superior to that of the Gould recording.

I've heard two recordings of this work in the past and thought it was just ugly music. Then I heard this incredible performance. It is so clear, so precise, so exciting! I will listen to it again and again. This is the one to buy. It's wonderful!

On this Phillips disc from 2001, pianist Mitsuko Uchida performs several works by the Second Viennese School that she wishes to bring to greater prominence. As she explains in her liner notes, the basis of these works is far from the eggheaded mathematics, and she finds the music elegant and memorable.

Schoenberg's Piano Concerto (1942) shows, as many pieces of Alban Berg, just how rooted to traditional the Second Viennese School remained in spite of their atonal language. The language here is an only slightly distorted Romanticism of the Brahms and Mahler varieties: the rhythms in this piece, the phrases uttered by the orchestra and the soloist, and the four-movement structure moving from a happy-go-lucky life to disaster and then to some sort of resolution are all so early 19th century. In fact, this concerto is regularly presented to subscriber audiences in Europe because it fits in so well with Romantic warhorses. And if presented to a general audience in the company of some those warhorses, I suspect few would imagine there was serious controversy around Schoenberg's language.

Alban Berg's "Piano Sonata" (1907-08) was the composer's opus number 1 and is still thoroughly late Romantic. Musicologists might point to bold steps towards atonality, but most listeners are just going to bask in a warmth inherited from the 19th century. Schoenberg's "Drei Klavierstuck" op. 11 (1909) sees the composer cautious treading from tonality to atonality. Rhythms and phrasing remain in his erstwhile expressionist vein, but in the first and second pieces one perceives a certain extra spikiness. In the third piece, Schoenberg has fully entered his free atonal style with a rapid flurry of anguished lines. The "Sechs kleine Klavierstucke" op. 19 of two years later are neatly crafted atonal miniatures, though as they were written over the course of one day they are more private musings then grand public proclamations. Anton Webern's "Variations for Piano" op. 27 (1936) is the true example of extreme modernism on the disc, three movements of pointilistic writing where each bleep and bloop is framed by pregnant silences.

All in all this is a great introduction to the piano music of the Second Viennese School, showing how Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern were not complete radicals breaking with the past, but three craftsmen seeking to extend the tradition they inherited in a way they found meaningful.

I have heard many recorded and live performances of the Berg Sonata, but this is the first which, in my opinion, gives us what Berg intended. The sonata is underrated by many, who clearly have not studied it carefully or listened to it repeatedly. It not to be merely knocked off,as with so many performers(e.g.,Perahia, Aimard, Gould, Nin An, et al.). Berg's score is richly detailed with clues to his intentions which, when followed (as here), result in an illuminating and accessible performance. And only an elitist would quarrel with accessibility. The artist's accuracy, particularly in the difficult development section (usually muddied up by others), and her sensitive interpretation throughout, make this the choice of the litter.