Word: schoenberg
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Darmstadt courses opened in 1946 as refreshers for Hitler-frustrated German musicians who wanted to brush up on their Stravinsky, Bartok, Hindemith and Schoenberg. In succeeding years, Darmstadt focused on the development of serial techniques in Schoenberg and Webern, and gave exposure to the works of such post-serial experimenters as Edgar Varese and Olivier Messiaen. Soon younger composers-notably Hans Werner Henze and Pierre Boulez-began unveiling compositions of their own at the festival's semiprivate "workshop" concerts...
...final work of the concert, and thus the final work of the entire Monday night series, was Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire Op 21, (1912). Set to rather morbid poetry by Albert Giraud, the work exerted a curious kind of fascination on the audience--except those Philistines who apparently could not take it and left in the middle. The work's success owes in no small part to the performers, particularly conductor Jacques-Louis Monod, who made eminent sense out of music that is all too easily incomprehensible, and "narrator" Bethany Beardslee whose negotiation of all the weirdities of Schoenberg...
...cares if Leon Kirchner did not phrase the last movement of the Mozart Eb major piano quartet as if it began on an upbeat? And what if Jaime Laredo did force a bit in the suite from Stravinsky's L'histoire du Soldat? And if the Schoenberg Suite Op. 29 is a little hard to take on first hearing, for petesake go listen to it again...
...Schoenberg is in reality quite a different piece. Written slightly over a decade before the Sessions Quintet, the Trio is possibly even more severe in idiom. Where the Sessions is expansive, the Schoenberg is concentrated, pithy, intense. Contrasts are much more frequent and stark, with ferocity and elegy following in close succession in a kind of mosaic sound. Schoenberg's use of effects such as tremolo, col legno and harmonics is absolutely chilling...
...Concert Series get more adventurous, attendance at Sanders becomes less enthusiastic, (though those who do come are as responsive as ever). This is too bad, since a lot of important but seldom-performed music is being played. The Galimir group are excellent exponents of works like the Sessions and Schoenberg, and it is well worth anybody's while to hear them perform...