Stas Ovchinnikov's video: Alban Berg - Lyrische Suite Filarmonica -Quartet Schoenberg - Verkl rte Nacht Op 4 string sextet

Composer: Alban Maria Johannes Berg (9 February 1885 -- 24 December 1935) Lyrische Suite [Lyric suite], written between 1925-1926 I. Allegretto gioviale II. Andante amoroso III. Allegro misterioso – Trio estatico IV. Adagio appassionato V. Presto delirando – Tenebroso VI. Largo desolato Berg's Lyric Suite abounds in secret messages. In purely musical terms, Berg here for the first time employs Schoenberg's 12-tone system, basing some of the third and fifth movements on rows using all 12 notes of the chromatic scale. (And in one row, Berg proudly told Schoenberg, he used not only all available notes, but all available intervals.) Also, the fourth movement carries a quotation from the Lyric Symphony of Zemlinsky, to whom the suite is dedicated. In more personal terms, the music documents the course of Berg's extramarital affair with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Not only do the movement titles suggest an all-too-familiar sequence (from jovial through amorous and ecstatic to gloomy and sorrowful), but Berg incorporates his and Fuchs-Robettin's initials into the melodies and ties the metronome markings to numerological associations with their names. The sixth movement's quotation of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde is a clear reference to illicit love. The first movement, though freely atonal, lives up to its designation of Allegretto gioviale; it's a short, perky piece. Things become quieter and more intimate with the sensuous Andante amoroso, although the mood is still sometimes rather capricious, despite an elegiac interlude at its center. Intensity builds with the Allegro misterioso, which opens with nocturnal insect music, liberally employing pizzicato and other effects. This is, effectively, the work's scherzo movement, and at its center is a Trio estatico -- still keeping a fairly quick tempo, but now using mostly conventional bowing for longer-lined phrases. The scherzo music reappears, running in reverse to the movement's end. The fourth movement, Adagio appassionato, forms the quartet's emotional center, with something tense and foreboding about much of the music's passion. A thrashing, dissonant climax gives way to a long passage of relative, but not quite settled, repose. The ensuing Presto delirando-Tenebroso alternates frantic music with quiet, dark, tense passages. The concluding Largo desolato maintains these moods at a much slower tempo, the music gradually dying away. [www.allmusic.com] Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night), Op. 4, for string sextet (1899) A work in one movement for string sextet by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), his first true masterpiece, which is perhaps his most enduring composition. Composed in a highly harmonically advanced post-Romantic idiom, this work demonstrates that the young Schoenberg, aged 25, had already surpassed all his contemporaries in their style; it is little wonder that he would go on to search for new modes of composition and musical expression, pioneering atonal, expressionist and twelve-tone music. Even in this early work, the extensive use of chromaticism, modulation, dissonance and unorthodox harmonies made it very controversial when it premiered in 1902. In particular, Schoenberg used a certain "nonexistent" inverted ninth chord (it was nonexistent because it was uncategorized, and hence forbidden by convention), and this led the Vienna Musical Society to reject the composition. "Verklärte Nacht" takes as its subject a poem by Richard Dehmel that describes a man and a woman walking through a dark forest at night. She confesses a secret to him: She is pregnant with the child of another man. He reflects on this revelation in silence, and eventually comes to accept and forgive the woman. Schoenberg was inspired by his feelings for Mathilde von Zemlinsky, the daughter of his teacher Alexander von Zemlinsky and his future wife. This classic performance by the Hollywood String Quartet dates from 1955. English translation of Dehmel's poem: Two people are walking through a bare, cold wood; the moon keeps pace with them and draws their gaze. The moon moves along above tall oak trees, there is no wisp of cloud to obscure the radiance to which the black, jagged tips reach up. A woman's voice speaks: "I am carrying a child, and not by you. I am walking here with you in a state of sin. I have offended grievously against myself. I despaired of happiness, and yet I still felt a grievous longing for life's fullness, for a mother's joys "and duties; and so I sinned, and so I yielded, shuddering, my sex to the embrace of a stranger, and even thought myself blessed. Now life has taken its revenge, and I have met you, met you." She walks on, stumbling. She looks up; the moon keeps pace. Her dark gaze drowns in light. A man's voice speaks: "Do not let the child you have conceived be a burden on your soul. Look, how brightly the universe shines! Splendour falls on everything around, you are voyaging with me on a cold sea, ...