Word: schonberg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...AFTERNOON CONCERT. Schonberg, Variations for Orchestra; Rust, Viola sonata; Moussorgsky, Sorochintsy Fair; Gabrieli, Canzone; Potter, Variations on a popular tune; Mendelssohn, Piano trio...
...commented that Nazism and anti-Semitism were not fit subjects for a humorous approach. "He was dead wrong," Behrman says, pointing out that Franz Werfel had told him the true story from which the play was taken at Max Reinhardt's Hollywood home. "Also present was the composer Arnold Schonberg; they were all refugees who had lost everything to the Nazis, but they all laughed themselves sick. The capacity to laugh is the strongest thing in people...
...concert concluded with the late Anton Webern's Three Songs, Opus 23 (1934), excellently sung by Sarah Jane Smith. In them Webern applied his own refined pointillism to the atonal technique of Schonberg, with dubious success. I happen still to be old-fashioned enough to think that the human voice should not be asked to do everything an instrument can do. I find this disjunct kind of vocal writing, in which there are only angles instead of lines, highly ungrateful. The chief interest in these songs for me lies in rhythmic precision; and this in turn is best achieved...
Violin Concerto, by Berg's teacher, Arnold Schonberg, which still has a reputation as the most difficult concerto of all. Both are on LPs for the first time...
...effect of atonality (or as Schonberg preferred to call it, "pantonality") is not particularly pleasing to the ear. The absence of all conventional melody, harmony, rhythm, and direction in the piece leaves a half hour of tenseness and doubts which are never fully resolved. And the vacillating, rhapsodic themes, occasionally broken by piquant pizzicatos and eerie glissandos, gave me a feeling of desolation throughout. Viewed in its entirety, the work is a lot more difficult to comprehend than its more lyrical sister concerto, by Alban Berg, and future performances would be most welcome. Two hearings of the concerto aren...