Customer Reviews

Schoenberg: The Piano Music / Maurizio Pollini

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I am astonished by the review that gave this only 1 star. Schoenberg, even though he never played the piano, wrote masterfully for the instrument. These pieces advance piano literature by light-years, and one should not be prejudiced against them because none of them are written in his early post-Wagnerian manner. My advice: listen to each piece for 5 times consecutively. Then you will behold the poignant expressionism that many of the pieces convey. Great Works of Music. A Must for anyone interested in 20th Century Music.

What an incredibly powerful work of art this album is. A previous reviewer referred to the music as being extremely sensual and decadent; it is that and more. I would call it both erotic and demonic. It is also unbelievably intimidating at first! But such is to be expected in an intimate encounter with raw and complex genius. Pollini truly believes in the beauty and terror of this music; it is an immaculate and inspired performance, full and bursting with fiery energy and sudden, unpredictable humanity.

Schoenberg's music can be difficult for the first time listener - that I admit. If you give it some time, though, it begins to make much more sense, and the passion and expression written into the score begin to come out. It may not happen the first or second time you listen to this record, but if you put forth an effort, it will happen. Pollini plays these pieces with 100% conviction - absolutely essential for this music to come across. I would call his music making immaculate. As for that other review of this disc and the comments on Schoenberg, that listener did not do his homework on Schoenberg or the system which he created. Schoenberg did not set out to destroy tonality, he merely took the next logical step and devised a system (which even he does not strictly follow) that is derived from natural acoustical principles (overtone series). No self-respecting musicologist or even afficionado can deny that. If your not sure, do your own reasearch and find out. As part of your reasearch, buy this album - if you approach it with an open mind, it will not displease.

this still remains the most convincing interpretation of this music,although quite recently Mitsuko Uchida brings similar interpretive values as Pollini. Schoenberg had the guts like Freud within those times in deep dark Vienna to explore the uglier dimensions of the human spirit. Who denies that there is not a dark unexplored,disturbing area to all of us? It's fairly obvious. Schoenberg's piano music is very direct and functional, Bach-like contrapuntal designs. There is holdovers of post romanticism of accompanimental figures, Well who can step with both feet into the unknown better one foot at a time. Opus 11 remains the most powerfully compact excursion into this forbidden expressive world, with the flagellations of sound of timbre in this first piece, where you silently depress tones and violently play others,harmonics are the result. Schoenberg also had some elegant sense of voicing chords, other times they are quite ugly with base provincial voicings of atonal triads in thirds intervals, again very direct and bland yet exciting, and dark. What Pollini brings to this music as no other, is he's not afraid of making the music ugly, and he doesn't try to fix it's deep dark graphic dimensions. He also has a wonderful lyrical sense of direction, telescoping where the music is going.

The piano was where Schoenberg worked out his compositional problems. Op.11 was one of his first free atonal pieces and Op.23 contains his first serial movement. It is not fair to dismiss these pieces as merely experimental. It is true that they are more difficult to listen to than Schoenberg's orchestral or chamber music because there is no element of timbre- whereas in the third of Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra we can enjoy the tone color of the shifting orchestral texture, when listening to his piano music one is forced to concentrate on the pitches themselves. However, there is still a way into this music, even for the novice. To my ears, Pollini takes care above all to show how these pieces are an extension of the 19th century romantic tradition. There is, especially in op.11 and op.19 a genuinely romantic aesthetic. Even in such a hermetic piece as Op.25, Pollini's intentions cannot be questioned. And, of course, his technique is everywhere flawless.

Pollini is fantastic with Schoenberg's piano pieces. This chronological presentation allows you to hear the progression from the atonal works to the later 12-tone compositions. Adorno held the atonal works to be the highest pinnacle of expression, and it's easy to see why he was so impressed. I find it amazing to compare Schoenberg and the painter Kandinsky. They were friends, and participated in a joint revolution across types of art, Schoenberg pushing dissonant chromaticism into outright atonality as Kandinsky did the same with painting, pushing Impressionism's blurring of the object to total abstraction. Then, in the 1920s, Schoenberg developed his 12-tone system as Kandinsky developed a parallel system of abstract forms at Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau. I strongly prefer Kandinsky's Bauhaus work to his earlier period, while with Schoenberg, I enjoy both, but prefer the first breakthroughs to the atonal. His "Suite for Piano" and other 12-tone works incorporate a pure, Baroque structure, and mark a phase of consolidation. The earlier works, especially, seem to document the dissolution of the ego, and Pollini conveys them as fleeting, fugitive beauty.

the music fan from ny, ny is just being obnoxious. (well, if you don't like modernism or dissonance, you'll probably agree with him, but still--i mean, i wouldn't exactly call strauss an authority on musical taste) some of these, especially opp. 19 and 25, are really great pieces. pollini's performance strikes me as a bit cold, though; i actually like gould's recordings of these pieces, inaccurate though they may be. (his playing of the gigue from op. 25 on the soundtrack to "32 short films", although completely wrong in terms of tempo, is some of the most exciting schoenberg i've heard outside of "pierrot lunaire")

Schoenberg's music was difficult to interpret wel,l it is literally only within the last twenty years that his music has been performed with any degree of consistent regularity. And with Schoenberg as with any music you need time to reflect and think to enter his at time labyrinth sounds. There really is only two paths to interpreting Schoenberg, Alban Berg once said you need to make Mozart sound like the ink was still wet, and you need to make the New sound very old. Pollini does both with his intense affinity for the pure power of sound and Pollini unlike other pianists is not afraid of the new, of Boulez (the Second Sonata) and Luigi Nono(serene waves endured). You feel he brings these experiences with him. Pollini places one foot in the Twentieth and the other in tradition. This is done by not being afraid to simply let the sounds be noises, and irrational opaque moments. This music is about fantasy,of image,yet we never know what that image actually is. The early Twentieth Century always had fantasy. the miraculous not far from its sonoric innovations. The ballets ofRavel,Stravinsky,Bartok,Debussy,all had stupendous dialogueswith the unreal. Pollini though keeps us anchored in reality, a granite like sound here, a great discipline of phrase of tempo, of gesture. And that is what makes the music powerful. The other end of Schoenberg is to play him like Brahms, as Sir Georg Solti marvelous did in "Moses and Aron". I have heard Schoenberg's( this same piano music) pl,so we get unfocused blizzards of sound , Claude Helffer. . But here Pollini is in full radical control always challenge to scale the heights, jumping registers as in Opus 11 the last movement a demonic-like toccatam inspired. Gould(another gifted Schoenberg devotee) plays Schoenberg like Beethoven, great contrast (which the music needs sometimes not always) and great power. Pollini also has power as well yet he brings a sense of the forbidden, like the music will go over the edge,yet always in control.

Pollini's survey of Schoenberg's complete piano music is masterful, authoritative and possibly definitive. If you want it, it's now available again, coupled with Pollini's version of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic led by Claudio Abbado. They even throw in Anton Webern's Variations for good measure, so you get an outstanding bargain. I'm not really a Schoenberg fan, I prefer Webern myself. However Schoenberg's solo piano music is mysterious and darkly beautiful and shouldn't be passed up.

In my typically amateurish travels through classical music, I am most commonly disappointed by the works of the 20th century composers who have a reputation for innovation. I expect all of Stravinsky's works to sound like 'The Rites of Spring' and Schoenberg's music to sound dissonant at best. Instead, many of the leading 20th century composers sound pretty much like the late 19th century composers heavily influenced by Wagner. Not so these pieces. These are far more interesting, albeit totally less familiar than, for example, piano works by George Gershwin or even Bela Bartok. My only complaint, unless you can get it for a good discount, is that it has a scant 50 minutes of music on it. Otherwise, sublime.