Berg - Violin Concerto, 3 Orchestral Pieces, Piano Sonata (orch. Davis)
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Label: Chandos
Cat No: CHSA5270
Format: Hybrid SACD
Number of Discs: 1
Genre: Orchestral
Release Date: 30th September 2022
Contents
Works
Orchesterstucke (3), op.6Passacaglia (orch. Andrew Davis)
Piano Sonata, op.1 (orch. Andrew Davis)
Violin Concerto 'To the Memory of an Angel'
Artists
James Ehnes (violin)BBC Symphony Orchestra
Conductor
Andrew DavisWorks
Orchesterstucke (3), op.6Passacaglia (orch. Andrew Davis)
Piano Sonata, op.1 (orch. Andrew Davis)
Violin Concerto 'To the Memory of an Angel'
Artists
James Ehnes (violin)BBC Symphony Orchestra
Conductor
Andrew DavisAbout
Born in 1885, Alban Berg was one of the most significant composers of the Second Viennese School, whose output proved tremendously influential in the development of music in the twentieth century. He was a student of Schoenberg, who found that his juvenile compositions were almost exclusively written for voice; his natural ability to write lyrical melodic lines (even in later life while following the restrictions of twelve-tone serialism) probably remained the most outstanding quality of his style. His Op.1 Piano Sonata was the fulfilment of a task set by Schoenberg to write non-vocal music. The Passacaglia, written between the sonata and World War I was only completed in short-score, and may have been intended to form part of a larger work. Both pieces are recorded here in skilful orchestrations by Sir Andrew Davis. The Three Orchestral Pieces were composed alongside his first great masterpiece, Wozzeck, and could be seen as a tribute to his musical hero, Mahler. The Violin Concerto, from 1935, was commissioned by the American violinist Louis Krasner, but was inspired by the premature death (from polio) of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, hence the subtitle ‘to the memory of an angel’. It proved to be one of the composer’s final works as Berg died later that year as the result of an abscess from an insect sting.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Piano Sonata, Op.1 (orch. Davis)
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2Passacaglia (orch. Davis)
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3Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6. I. Praeludium
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4Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6. II. Reigen
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5Three Orchestral Pieces, Op. 6. III. Marsch
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6Violin Concerto. I. Andante - Allegretto
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7Violin Concerto. II. Allegro - Adagio - Coda
Europadisc Review
Conductor Andrew Davis’s latest recording for the Chandos label sees him at the helm of his old partners, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, of which he was Chief Conductor from 1988 to 2000. The repertoire – orchestral music by Alban Berg – is very much ‘home ground’ for them, and not just because it featured so frequently in the programmes of one of Davis’s predecessors in the post, Pierre Boulez. From its very foundation in 1930, the BBCSO was a crucial champion of new music, notably during the tenure of its founder conductor, Adrian Boult. So it is entirely appropriate that the main work on this disc is Berg’s Violin Concerto (1935), a work whose first recording, less than a month after its posthumous Barcelona premiere, featured the BBCSO with the concerto’s commissioner Louis Krasner, under the baton of no less a figure than Berg’s friend and fellow Schoenberg-pupil Anton Webern. Here, the soloist is Canadian violinist James Ehnes, and Davis speaks in glowing terms of their musical partnership in a work of which he has been a lifelong devotee in his booklet notes.
The Concerto itself is famous for memorialising Manon Gropius, the daughter of Mahler’s widow Alma with her second husband, the architect (and founder of the Bauhaus) Walter Gropius. Its two movements – each further divided into two sections – can be interpreted as depicting her birth, youth, illness, and death (from polio) at the age of just 18. But there are further allusions, including to a couple of Berg’s extramarital affairs, and it assumes yet more poignancy from the fact this was Berg’s last completed work (his magnum opus, the Wedekind-based opera Lulu, lay unfinished, its third act much later completed by Friedrich Cerha and premiered in 1979). Ehnes taps wonderfully into the music’s lyrical vein, accentuating the late-Romantic feel that characterised Berg’s music even in those works where – as here – he deployed twelve-tone technique. The second movement, with its second-half quotation of a Bach chorale, is especially touching, and the marvellous responsiveness of the orchestra is both finely focussed and highly sympathetic, thanks to the warm acoustic secured from the Watford Colosseum by producer Brian Pidgeon and engineers Ralph Couzens and Alexander James. The balance is ideal, and Chandos’s surround-sound recording is in a class of its own. Above all, Ehnes’s pliant, gentle-hued playing sets this account apart in a highly competitive field.
The other works on the disc are somewhat earlier. The Violin Concerto is preceded by an exceptionally vivid account of the Three Orchestral Pieces, op.6 (1914–15). Davis is not the only conductor to emphasise the Mahlerian legacy of these three extraordinary character movements, but few others build the trajectory quite so convincingly or unerringly from the opening unpitched percussion rumblings of the Prelude, through the Wozzeck-like sonorities and references to popular music of ‘Reigen’, to the steadily growing impetus towards cataclysm of the concluding March. The latter is given added emphasis by allowing more space than usual for the music to build from a steady opening tread to the final mighty hammer-blow, and the feeling for balance and sonority of Davis and his players is second to none.
That sense of being thoroughly steeped in the medium is evident in other two works on the disc: the shorter of these is Davis’s own orchestration of the unfinished Passacaglia that likely predates the Three Orchestral Pieces by just a year and inhabits much the same sound-world. According to Davis’s own splendidly insightful booklet note (how eloquently he writes!), the annotations in the surviving score are such that ‘much of the work of an orchestrator is done for him’. Yet the resolution of some thorny issues regarding tempi is Davis’s own, and thoroughly convincing, making this an ideal companion work for the op.6 pieces.
Even more compelling is the earliest work here, Berg’s landmark op.1 Piano Sonata, composed during his studies with Schoenberg and suffused with that unique mixture of late-Romanticism and early modernism which Berg made so indelibly his own. Other orchestrations have been attempted, of a work whose richness seems in bar after bar to evoke orchestral colour, but Davis’s own imbues it with a particularly immersive admixture of Mahler, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky, Schreker and, of course, Berg himself. The use of harp and (in the later stages) celesta is especially telling, and although the orchestra is a large one (including parts for alto flute and oboe d’amore), percussion is reserved for the bigger climaxes. It’s an enthralling achievement, one that every devotee of the Sonata in its original piano scoring should hear, and it sets the seal on an utterly captivating disc, further enhanced not only by Davis’s insightful commentary but by detailed repertoire notes from Gavin Plumley.
Reviews
Presented in this way, the sonata particularly sounds more forward-looking, more Bergian, than it often does on the piano, while the Passacaglia clearly shows its links to the work in the same form that Berg’s colleague and fellow Schoenberg pupil Anton Webern had designated as his Op 1. ... this is a wonderfully idiomatic and accomplished Berg collection, with some outstanding playing from the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Andrew ClementsThe Guardian 1 September 2022
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