CHAN 9999 front.qxd 10/5/07 3:31 pm Page 1 CHANDOS CHAN 9999 CHAN 9999 BOOK.qxd 10/5/07 3:38 pm Page 2 Alban Berg (1885–1935) Complete Chamber Music String Quartet, Op. 3 (1909–10) 25:53 1 I Langsam 10:18 2 II Mäßige Viertel 10:59 premiere recording 3 Hier ist Friede, Op. 4 No. 5 (1912)* 4:34 from Altenberg Lieder arranged for piano, harmonium, violin and cello by Alban Berg (1917) Ziemlich langsam premiere recording Four Pieces, Op. 5 (1913) 8:02 for clarinet and piano arranged for viola and piano by Henk Guittart (1992) 4 I Mäßig 1:28 5 II Sehr langsam 2:08 6 III Sehr rasch 1:19 7 IV Langsam 3:05 8 Adagio* 13:13 Alban Berg, c. 1925 Second movement from the Chamber Concerto for piano, violin and 13 wind instruments (1923–25) arranged for violin, clarinet and piano by Alban Berg (1935) 3 CHAN 9999 BOOK.qxd 10/5/07 3:38 pm Page 4 Berg: Complete Chamber Music Lyric Suite (1925–26) 28:41 With the exception of the Lyric Suite and the writing songs for performance by and within for string quartet Chamber Concerto, all the works on the the family. Writing to the publisher Emil 9 Allegretto giovale 3:08 present CD were written in the three years Hertzka in 1910, Schoenberg observed: from 1910 to 1913, when Alban Berg [Alban Berg] is an extraordinarily gifted composer, 10 Andante amoroso 6:15 (1885–1935) was in his mid-twenties. but the state he was in when he came to me was 11 Allegro misterioso – Trio estatico 3:24 The earliest work, the String Quartet, Op. 3 such that his imagination apparently could not 12 Adagio appassionato 5:54 of 1910, was the last work to be completed work on anything but Lieder. Even the piano 13 Presto delirando – Tenebroso 4:32 under the eye of his teacher, Arnold accompaniments to them were song-like. He was 14 Largo desolato 5:24 Schoenberg, with whom Berg since 1904 had absolutely incapable of writing an instrumental TT 75:52 been studying harmony and counterpoint and, movement or inventing an instrumental theme. from 1907 onwards, composition. The Quartet, Op. 3 is witness to Schoenberg’s Schoenberg Quartet One of the basic tenets of Schoenberg’s success in correcting this flaw: the piece is not Janneke van der Meer violin* teaching was the necessity of what he would only purely instrumental in conception but, like later call ‘developing variation’, the belief that the later Lyric Suite, extends the very nature of Wim de Jong violin the logic and coherence of a work depended the quartet medium. Henk Guittart viola on all its aspects being variations of a single The Altenberg Lieder, Op. 4, a set of five Viola de Hoog cello basic idea. It was a belief that Berg would orchestral songs on aphoristic verses by the with later pass on to his own students and it is a eccentric ‘coffee-house poet’ Peter Altenberg, Pierre Woudenberg clarinet principle that stands at the heart of the two occasioned one of the great musical scandals interlinked movements of Op. 3, in which the of the twentieth century. The first performance Bob Zimmerman harmonium second movement acts as a development of two of the songs (Nos 2 and 3 of the Sepp Grotenhuis piano section of the first movement’s sonata form completed cycle) formed part of a concert ‘exposition’, and in which motivic ideas are conducted by Schoenberg in the Musikverein constantly varied, inverted and reinterpreted in Vienna on 31 March 1913 when an already before the first movement’s material makes a restless audience rioted, the police had to be clear reappearance at the end of the work. called in to restore order and the concert Prior to his studies with Schoenberg, Berg abandoned. Deeply shaken by the experience, had been a dilettante, a self-taught composer Berg never again tried to have the songs 4 5 CHAN 9999 BOOK.qxd 10/5/07 3:38 pm Page 6 performed, and never had them published systematic, techniques governs the smaller, presents the whole of the first half backwards. note-row which is gradually transformed as during his lifetime. Thus the composer himself and in some cases the larger, structures of a Berg made the present trio arrangement for the work progresses. never heard what is arguably one of the most piece. In arranging the work for viola and violin, clarinet and piano (in which the original The last four movements are also linked by beautiful, most perfectly structured and most piano, Henk Guittart, the violist of the palindromic design is slightly modified by the reappearance of a four-note motto cell: imaginative song cycles of the twentieth Schoenberg Quartet, is of course following a three cuts totalling some twenty-two bars in A–B flat–B–F, a cell based on the initials of century. To be fully appreciated the five songs long tradition, the best-known examples of all) ten years after completing the Chamber the names Alban Berg and Hanna (the note must be heard in their entirety, for they are such arrangements being those by Brahms of Concerto. It was first performed in Vienna in B flat is H in German notation) Fuchs-Robettin, intricately linked motivically. Berg himself, his own two Clarinet Sonatas, Op. 120 for February 1935 at the small celebration held the woman with whom Berg was in love for the however, decided that the fifth and longest of viola and piano. to mark his fiftieth birthday. last ten years of his life and to whom the Lyric the set, Hier ist Friede, a passacaglia which The Chamber Concerto of 1923–25 and Exhibiting, as it does, the composer’s Suite is secretly dedicated. Like Janáˇcek’s brings together all the main motivic elements the Lyric Suite for string quartet of 1925–26 intricate and highly individual sense of formal Second String Quartet (Intimate Letters), written of the whole cycle, could stand on its own were both written after the completion of design, his love of large-scale palindromes, a few years later, the Lyric Suite is a record of a and published a vocal score of the song in a Wozzeck and indeed, in the case of the Lyric independent rhythmic schemes, ‘abstract’ doomed love affair, doomed because the two Dresden periodical in 1921. The present Suite, at a time when, following the premiere pre-compositional devices, cryptic people involved were already married. The work arrangement for piano, harmonium, violin and of the opera in December 1925, Berg had autobiographical references, quotations, charts the progress of the affair, from the jovial cello, but without voice, was made in 1917 as become a composer of international cyphers, cryptograms and elaborate Allegretto giovale first movement and a portrait a gift for Alma Mahler and her daughter Anna. significance. numerological conceits, the Lyric Suite is a of Hanna and her children in the Andante The Altenberg Lieder and, to an even The Chamber Concerto, a three-movement virtual compendium of the technical amoroso second, through a muted declaration greater extent, the Four Pieces, Op. 5, work for solo piano, violin and thirteen wind preoccupations of the mature Berg. Together, of love, Allegro misterioso, a passionate love originally written for clarinet and piano, are instruments, is perhaps the most strictly the work’s six movements form a complex and scene, Adagio appassionato, and a nightmarish unusual in Berg’s output. Unlike most of structured of all Berg’s compositions. The highly original overall design with the fast and scherzo, Presto delirando – Tenebroso, which Berg’s music, which is conceived on a large piece is designed in such a way that the first slow movements alternating in such a way that depicts the horrors and pain of the days and scale, the brief clarinet Pieces reflect the movement, a lively set of variations for piano the fast ones become progressively faster and nights that follow. The final Largo desolato is a tendency towards writing miniatures that was and wind, and the lyrical second movement, the slow progressively slower. Within this (wordless) setting of Stefan George’s translation a characteristic of both Schoenberg and Anton for violin and wind, are then superimposed scheme each of the six movements (except the of ‘De profundis clamavi’ from Baudelaire’s Webern in the years immediately before the and rhythmically transformed to create a finale first, naturally) quotes from the one before Les Fleurs du mal. Two references to the First World War. They also mark the furthest that is totally independent in both structure (sometimes at length, so that the Trio estatico material of the opening Allegretto giovale close step that Berg ever took in renouncing distinct and character. of the third movement, for example, acts as the formal circle, the work ending with a pair of thematic and motivic features in favour of The central Adagio is an intricately worked- the exposition of the following Adagio). In gently rocking notes on solo viola, ‘dying away music in which the material is generated from out movement in which the first half, adopting addition the first movement, the outer sections with love, yearning and grief…’ the manipulation of small cells, and in which an ABA form with the second A an inversion of the third, the trios of the fifth, and the the application of various, more or less of the first, is followed by a second half which whole of the sixth movement are linked by a © 2002 Douglas Jarman 6 7 CHAN 9999 BOOK.qxd 10/5/07 3:38 pm Page 8 In 2001 the Schoenberg Quartet celebrated Membership in 1989, an honour previously affection for contemporary music has led to formed a highly successful piano duo with its twenty-fifth anniversary.