Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951)
Verklärte Nacht, op 4 (second version for string orchestra, 1943)
Chamber Symphony no. 1, op.9 (1906)
Die Jakobsleiter (1915-1922)
Variations for Orchestra, op.31 (1926-1928)
Violin Concerto op.36 (1934-1936)
Rundfunkchor Berlin (chorus master: Gijs Leenars)
Berliner Philharmoniker/Kirill Petrenko
rec. live, 2019-2024, Philharmonie Berlin, Germany
Texts and translations included
Berliner Philharmoniker Recordings BPHR250511 [3 CDs + 1 Blu-ray:147]
‘Who’s afraid of Arnold Schoenberg?’ asks Harvey Sachs in one of several booklet notes in this handsome, even lavish presentation of major works by the composer, released last year (2025) in the aftermath of sadly muted, yet nonetheless important and welcome 2024 celebrations for the sesquicentenary of Schoenberg’s birth. Too many people still, it seems, at least for those of us whose enthusiasm and, yes, love for Schoenberg’s music only grow with time’s passing. Apart from the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna, for which the anniversary was naturally a highpoint of participants’ professional lives, one venue from Schoenberg’s three principal cities – Vienna, Berlin, and Los Angeles – took trouble to pay the twentieth century’s most important composer his due. If we sought in vain for contributions from its opera houses and most of its orchestras, in the Philharmonie, home to the Berlin Philharmonic, there was a year-long exhibition, put together in collaboration with the ASC. We also heard several musical offerings throughout the year, often with the orchestra’s chief conductor and artistic director, Kirill Petrenko. A conductor with what is already a distinguished pedigree in Schoenberg – his first London appearance was at Covent Garden, conduction an outstanding double-bill of Erwartung and Bluebeard’s Castle – Petrenko leads what will surely become an essential reference point for some of the best orchestral (and choral) Schoenberg from the first quarter of the twenty-first century. This collection draws on concerts from a period of five years, the first a 2019 recording with Patricia Kopatchinskaja of the Violin Concerto, chronologically the last of the works featured here.
From the following year, 2020, comes the opening work: the second, 1943 string orchestral version of the sextet Verklärte Nacht. The first, from 1917, is not so very different, but has effectively been superseded by the second, whose origins lie more in the need for US copyright than a need for substantive revision. Verklärte Nacht is a work that has fared well on disc, whether as chamber or orchestral music, Herbert von Karajan’s 1974 frankly Wagnerian Berlin Philharmonic recording a cornerstone of its discography and reception, as indeed are the other performances in Karajan’s small, select Second Viennese discography. There is also a very late, live recording on Testament from Karajan’s final London concert in 1988, coupled as live with Brahms’s First Symphony. Leaving aside the string sextet original, I tend to prefer performances that treat the music as chamber music writ large, though I am always happy to be surprised by something on the grander scale—and often have been. I recall an exquisite performance, likewise at the Royal Festival Hall, from massed Vienna Philharmonic strings under Pierre Boulez in 1999, 100 years after the sextet had been written; no one could have wanted more—or less. That is, of course, only one of the dialectics to be navigated in performances: others include what might broadly call the Brahms-Wagner polarity and, related but not to be identified with that, the relationship between programme and so-called ‘absolute’ music.
The course charted by Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic of 2020 vintage seems to me to encompass as much as may be possible of those differing, sometimes contradictory demands as we are likely to hear. Its D minor opening, ‘grave’ as per Schoenberg’s request, is at least as melting in tone as anything previous incarnations of the orchestra have summoned, and arguably more precise: already pressing on, yet with all the time in the world. The demands of Brahmsian motivic development and Wagnerian ‘endless melody’ – not so distinct as some might think – are equally attended to. Playing is as cultivated as that of a great chamber ensemble, yet greater numbers and heft remind us of the early, celebrated observation by Richard Heuberger that the music sounded as if someone had smeared the score of Tristan und Isolde when still wet. It was not intended as a compliment, but that does not mean we may not take it as such, whilst also cautioning against any suggestion of imprecision. Indeed, though the tone poem may be ‘set’ in the forest, one may almost think of at times – and feel – a crashing of waves redolent not only of Tristan but also Debussy’s slightly later La Mer. Jugendstil string lines are as eloquent as any string accompagnato, even if their ‘message’cannot, should not be reduced to words, be they those of Richard Dehmel’s originating poem or anyone else. Its eroticism, silence as much as surging, lacks nothing. Here is a shocking, irresistible Romanticism-cum-expressionism to compare with any, founded in yet far from restricted to the accomplishment of such an outstanding orchestra of soloists.
Excellent recorded sound only furthers the sense of a musical drama as redolent of the opera house as the concert hall. There is a darker fundamental tone at times than chez Karajan: to my ears (still) more in keeping with the work’s roots, historical and harmonic, and indeed suggesting that the orchestra’s Furtwänglerian years are far from dead. As indeed with Wilhelm Furtwängler – whose performances of this work do not survive – a flexibility in tempo is understood within a single, overarching musicodramatic framework. Pinpoint precision is the means to highly expressive ends, sometimes overwhelmingly so. I do not know of a superior recorded version and immediately forgot my alleged preference for smaller, chamber orchestral versions (or those similar in approach), though for such an approach I should continue to recommend Heinz Holliger with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. Petrenko captures that particular, burning variety of detailed intensity and concision – Beethoven as well as Brahms, I think – yet paints it on a similarly desirable, even necessary, Wagnerian canvas.
It may not sound like a welcome surprise, but it actually was to hear the opening strains of the Chamber Symphony no.1, op.9, emerge from the afterglow of Verklärte Nacht: not only an invitation to cease wallowing, but also a reminder that there is so much more to Schoenberg than ‘late Romanticism’ (however problematical the designation). This performance is at least as intense as that of the tone poem, perhaps riper still, immediacy heightened by a close recording that not only enables the complexity of counterpoint to burn through, but also heightens the sense of a work on the cusp of Expressionism, a counterpart to Strauss’s Salome, and yet cements its place in the chamber writing and serenades of a Viennese past extending back through Brahms and Beethoven to Mozart. The work’s notorious problems of balance (which led Karajan, no less, to avoid it) is never so much as hinted at. Cultivation of instrumental playing is every inch the equal of that in Verklärte Nacht, certain lines rightly germinating from that world, albeit now in a more varied timbral palette.
Formal innovation of a Lisztian variety, four symphonic movements in a single sonata structure, is perhaps the work’s most celebrated single characteristic, yet this taut but weighty performance offers a nudge to suggest that form should never be an end in itself: it is rather the agent that brings the piece’s expressive content into being. Already, indeed, it seems to suggest at times a later Schoenberg: that of the Variations for Orchestra, op.31, to be heard later in the collection. Climaxes are expertly prepared and performed in a reading that is doubtless deeply considered yet never sounds clinical. There are speedier, more high-spirited performances to be heard. If I were to be hyper-critical, it never quite takes flight as some, but it lays claim to other virtues that perhaps only a Boulez or a Michael Gielen have ever quite combined in a single performance. It is a less life-affirming Schoenberg than many, but offers no less a claim on our attention for that; it makes for a genuinely distinctive addition to the Schoenberg discography.
The Chamber Symphony and Die Jakobsleiter recordings originate in the same concerts at the end of January 2024, at the beginning of the composer’s 150th anniversary year. I attended one, to review it for Seen and Heard International, and thought the Jakobsleiter by some way the best performance I had ever heard of the (unfinished) work, live, broadcast or recorded. My experience of the Chamber Symphony was disrupted at the time, by an audience member falling il and having to be taken out of the hall, so I am grateful for the second chance in that respect. This was actually the first and so far the last live Jakobsleiter performance I, as an avid Schoenbergian had heard, which may give some indication of quite how rare such opportunities are. In some ways, it is one of those works one needs to experience live, not least on account of the spatial element. There is little point in purism about such matters, though—and indeed the Berlin Philharmonic has brought us a little nearer to that experience by offering a bonus Blu-Ray for all works, especially valuable for this, so that we can see and imagine ourselves in the Philharmonie, the space an integral part of that performance—just as it might be for the Monteverdi Vespers or the Prometeo of Schoenberg’s son-in-law Luigi Nono.
Heard in this order, that suggested by the ordering of CDs as well as composition, the oratorio emerges at white heat, if not as quite the next chapter in Schoenberg’s spiritual and technical journey – a formulation he employed long before its marketing-led cheapening – then a somewhat later one in which one can again hear and feel strong roots in its predecessors. Similarly, we hear what feels close to the almost infinitely variegated tonal palette of his very large orchestral and vocal forces. For this is an orchestra that has gained its spurs through the (not so far recorded) Five Orchestral Pieces, op.16, and sounded like it, all the while with that dark, burnished, ‘traditional German’ sound some might have thought banished for ever under Karajan, Abbado, and Rattle, but seemingly now rejuvenated rather than merely recreated under Petrenko. The variety of modes of speech and singing is a masterclass in itself, whether pertaining to work or performance, but much the same might be said of the orchestral playing. If a recording cannot communicate, at least in the same way, quite the same intensity of religious conviction I heard live, this is far more than a mere memento, and would now mark my first choice for the work, outstanding performance and recording bringing us closer to the ‘real thing’ than any other I have experienced.
We sense – far more than merely observing – through harmony and counterpoint Schoenberg’s construction and constructivism from the outset: this is a ladder, even a heaven, being built—and one begins to understand both how and why. ‘Whether right or left, forward or backward, uphill or downhill’: one likewise feels, harmonically, motivically, conceptually the elusive, multi-dimensional Idea Schoenberg understood as fundamental to his work and quest, both as composer and human being. A well-nigh flawless cast of vocal soloists exceeds expectations. Again, the variety of colours and expressive gestures within a single performance, be it that of the deeply commanding Wolfgang Koch, the increasingly Heldentenor-like Daniel Behle, the dark, rich Gyula Orendt, the souls in vocalise of Liv Redpath and Jasmin Delfs, or the outstanding Berlin Radio Choir. We breathe the air, of the Schoenbergian ascent into the ether.
We move ever upwards, according to Emanuel Swedenborg’s – and Schoenberg’s – text, heralded by the sweetest of violin solos from a Parsifalian ‘above’. Instrumental and human voices alike resound at the close as if truly from the heavens: less in surround than in person, yet still unmistakeably so. We feel, then, less ‘the air of another planet’ than of another dimension, both physical and metaphysical, Schoenberg having taken a step or two beyond even Mahler and Wagner, the work’s lack of completion, like that subsequently of the opera Moses und Aron, both poignant and instructive: on the threshold, one might say, of something that cannot (yet) be revealed.
The Variations for Orchestra, op.31, might well be considered a ‘Berlin Philharmonic’ work. Its 1928 premiere was given by the orchestra under Furtwängler, although none too successfully it would seem. Anton Webern was scathing about the lack of care and understanding the conductor had shown, scheduling only three rehearsals. In the orchestra, the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky observed the composer become utterly lost during the performance; Piatigorsky recalled in his memoir that Furtwängler had spoken with relief that the composer, in possession of the only other score, would not be able to attend. Those in a perplexed audience, then, were not necessarily at fault at finding themselves lost too. In happier terms, Karajan’s Berlin performances and recording helped another generation make considerably greater sense of it. In some ways, we might almost imagine, however fancifully, this as the considered performance Furtwängler might and ought to have given: as one with grounding in musical history and tradition not so dissimilar to Schoenberg’s own, even if he could rarely if ever sympathise with Schoenberg’s creative response to the problems and opportunities they posed.
At any rate, there is to my ears no question that the level of musical understanding here under Petrenko is again one to rank alongside the best, such as Boulez, Gielen, Daniel Barenboim, and from earlier generations, musicians such as Karajan, Hans Rosbaud, and Hermann Scherchen. Nor is there any question that the Berlin Philharmonic’s playing here surpasses almost all of its predecessors. As with a symphonic work by Brahms, with which it has much in common – part of the reason for Boulez’s ambivalence to it – the Variations probably demands, or at least suggests, more interpretative strategies than any one performance can permit. Barenboim may have been the most all-encompassing in my experience, especially when prefacing it with a superlative spoken introduction with orchestra. Petrenko brings that darker orchestral tone he seems to favour in Schoenberg to this performance and is amply repaid with that, reinforcing Brahmsian tendencies in particular, but also reminding us that this remains a tonal universe transformed by Tristan as well as Schoenberg’s music in between. Schoenberg’s ear not only for instrumental combination but its combination with harmony reaches back to Bach and forward to Boulez (and beyond).
Work and performance come into being almost from the future, as if a ship from the 1950s or 60s has veered back towards the world of the op.16 Pieces, then increasingly triumphantly engaging with tradition, symbolised a little too readily by the composer cipher BACH. And that is only the introduction. The theme itself here has a welcome grounding in the Viennese waltzes that run throughout Schoenberg’s œuvre; it also sounds intriguingly close to the world-to-come of Berg’s Lulu and the composer’s own Von heute auf morgen. It becomes – as well as merely ‘is’ – an heir to Mahler’s conception of a symphony, here a symphonic work, as a ‘world’: a world that is as unmistakeably of late 1920s central Europe as those works would be of their slightly later time, unfolding in expertly guided time as a great performance of Mahler, Brahms, or Beethoven might. Petrenko expertly guides each variation so as to sound very much as such, just as in Brahms, but also to take its place within a longer, more Wagnerian single breath, such as Furtwängler would surely have appreciated, had he come to know the work better. And the outstanding quality of the Berlin Philharmonic’s orchestral playing, both in solos and in ensemble, draws one in: musically, intellectually, and emotionally, as does the accompanying quality of the recording. With Schoenberg, the ‘problem’, contrary to popular opinion, is not of some arid intellectualism, a lack of emotion, but hyper-expressivity that proves too much for some to take. The more one is led here to listen as music, just as one might to anything else, the more the butterfly spreads its wings: here in an almost infinite palette of timbres, all implicitly founded in the work’s progress.
And so, to the Violin Concerto, the only work here from Schoenberg’s Californian exile. It is a formidable technical challenge for the soloist in particular, almost legendarily so; Jascha Heifetz rejected it as unplayable. Unlike earlier envisaged works in the genre, it is written for full orchestra, very much placed in the venerable Austro-German tradition of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms. With a little defensiveness, neither uncharacteristic nor, given his life experience, unwarranted, Schoenberg wrote to Webern in January 1936 that he had conceived of the work at the same time as Berg had of his. It is certainly then a concerto suited to the world of this orchestra—and so it sounds here. Kopatchinskaja, Petrenko, and the orchestra too are fully inside the idiom as well as any technical demands. Crucially, they then can treat the concerto as music—and do. Placed in the context of this set, it emerges in a particular line, thus aiding the listener to do so too. We recognise certain characteristics – melodic and harmonic twists, for instance – not only from the Variations, but even from Verklärte Nacht. We also, though, hear more keenly than ever what is singular about this work: the fuller orchestration, for instance, in some ways a more defiant statement of tradition than that of invoking Bach in the Variations. More fundamentally, we live in and increasingly enjoy the twists and turns of the play Schoenberg has navigating his extension of traditional virtuosity, in solo-and-orchestra mode, within the more current polyphonic and motivic demands of the twelve-note method.
Throughout the three traditional movements, Kopatchinskaja, whose tone fits perfectly as if an emanation of the Berlin strings and the orchestra more generally, puts not a finger wrong: not even the sixth finger Schoenberg joked with an interlocutor it might need. The thoroughgoing musical virtuosity, never display for its own sake, is often jawdropping. Like her orchestral colleagues, Kopatchinskaja draws fine distinction between hierarchies of voices and their expressive implications as if it were the easiest thing in the world—and just as they might with the music of Schoenberg’s past. All inhabit the world nourished by the central European soil in which music, composer, and all manner of critical reaction to him once grew. The music waltzes and otherwise dances; it sings; above all, it beguiles, captivates, and refuses to let one go. Playing in Leopold Stokowski’s Philadelphia Orchestra for the 1940 premiere, the violinist and composer, Louis Gesensway, was so scandalised by its reception from a hostile, hissing audience that he wrote to a newspaper extolling its ‘utmost perfection’, its lack of a single ‘trite or hackneyed phrase’, declaring: ‘The violinist is really playing “fiddle” music.’ That is how it sounds here, as in Berg or in Bach, so that one can scarcely imagine what the Schoenberg ‘problem’ had ever been, why anyone might have feared in the first place. I could draw comparisons with earlier landmark recordings – Zeitlin/Kubelík or Hahn/Salonen, for instance – but I shall simply let this outstanding recording stand for itself among the very best of twenty-first-century Schoenberg.
Mark Berry
Previous review Dominic Hartley
Soloists
Wolfgang Koch (baritone); Daniel Behle (tenor); Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke (tenor); Johannes Martin Kränzle (baritone); Gyula Orendt (baritone); Stephan Rügamer (tenor); Nicola Beller Carbone (soprano); Liv Redpath (soprano); Jasmin Delfs (soprano, Die Seele); Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin)
Offstage conductors (for Die Jakobslieter)
David Bui, Gregor Mayhofer, Giuseppe Mentuccia, Friedrich Suckel
Recording details
Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4 – rec. live 28 August 2020
Chamber Symphony no. 1, Op. 9 – rec. live 25-27 January 2024
Die Jakobsleiter – rec. live 25-27 January 2024
Variations for Orchestra, Op. 31 – rec. live 25-27 January 2023
Violin Concerto Op. 36 – rec. live 7-9 March 2019
DVD details
Picture: Full HiD 1080 / 60I – 16:9
Sound: PCM Stereo / Dolby Atmos
Region Code: ABC (worldwide)
Running time concerts: 174 mins
Subtitles (Die Jakobsleiter) in German, English, and Japanese
