Word: schoenbergs
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Triple bill reveals Schoenberg's recalcitrant beauties
...Composer Arnold Schoenberg spent a few months in Barcelona. It seemed only natural for a colleague to suggest that a composition by the revolutionary Viennese master should be played at a local concert. Schoenberg reacted with mock alarm. "I have made many friends here who have never heard my works but who play tennis with me," he said. "What will they think of me when they hear my horrible dissonances...
...Schoenberg's dissonances have long since become the common currency of 20th century music. No other composer of his time except Stravinsky has proved as influential, and even Stravinsky came around at the end of his life to his rival's method of composition. Yet today, nearly 30 years after Schoenberg's death, the question of what ordinary concertgoers will think of him remains unsettled. The music, like the man, is complex, uncompromising, obstinately single-minded in its innovative rigor. Audiences have felt, as many critics have, that Schoenberg put truth before beauty. They have often found...
...opera company to present a triple bill like Santa Fe's current "A Schoenberg Evening" is thus fairly bold, even when the company has a distinguished history of staging new and venturesome works. Judging from the progressively thinning house on opening night, Santa Fe's gamble may not be paying off at the box office. But to listeners willing to endure a little heavy harmonic weather, the evening not only confirms Schoenberg's truth but reveals some of his recalcitrant beauties...
...pianist of comparable stature can match Pollini as an exponent of contemporary music. His programs feature the works of Webern, Schoenberg, Boulez, Stockhausen and his friend Luigi Nono, alongside more standard offerings. "The music of today is a mirror of our time, of its problems," he says. "Why is it normal to be interested in Picasso and Joyce and not in Schoenberg and Stockhausen?" He has sometimes paid for this conviction by being booed at performances, an experience that he shrugs off: "No response at all would be worse." Once, in Vienna, a Stockhausen score called for him to strike...