Track Listing

1. Suite, septet in E flat major, Op. 29: No. 1, Overture (Allegretto)
2. Suite, septet in E flat major, Op. 29: No. 2, Tanzschritte (Moderato)
3. Suite, septet in E flat major, Op. 29: No. 3, Thema mit Variationen
4. Suite, septet in E flat major, Op. 29: No. 4, Gigue
5. Verklärte Nacht, for string sextet, Op. 4
6. Little Pieces (3) for chamber orchestra (No.3 unfinished): No. 1, (oboe, clarinet, horn & solo string quartet)
7. Little Pieces (3) for chamber orchestra (No.3 unfinished): No. 2, (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn & solo string quartet)
8. Little Pieces (3) for chamber orchestra (No.3 unfinished): No. 3, (flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn & solo string quartet) (fragm

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #105416 in Music
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 1993-07-13
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .23 pounds

Customer Reviews

5-Stars Just for being in Print...
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With the dearth of Schoenberg recordings, gotta give this CD 5-stars simply for being in print.

Boulez and the Ensemble Intercontemporain are great. The disc has the Verklärte Nacht curse--that is, nearly every Schoenberg CD has Verklärte Nacht on it! However, this features the original sextet version which is interesting for the timber alone. Cf. Brahms' two string sextets, and Reger's if you can find it.

The Suite for septet, however, is quintessential Schoenberg and must not be missed.

Razor-sharp 12-tone hardcore work, features curious sonic effects with the three clarinets and specialized techinques with the three stringed instruments: col legno (using the wood of the bow for tapping or bowing on the strings or body of the instrument); glissandi (sliding down the strings); extensive pizzicato (plucking the strings), etc.
Noted old binary dance steps give the work the appearance of something like Decadent/Expressionistic Austrian jazz: very scary, and very Schönbergian.

See:
Schoenberg: Suite / Wind Quintet
for an excellent Septet with the great Wind Quintet. Was out of print; recently reissued.
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A distinctly eclectic Schoenberg collection
This disc, one of a number rereleasing Pierre Boulez's 1970s and 1980s recordings of much of Schoenberg's work, forms a rather curious collection. Centred around what is probably Schoenberg's most-played work, the popular Verklärte Nacht (though heard here in the less common version for string sextet), the disc also takes in two of his less-well-known works, the Suite, op 29 (also known as the Septet) and the minute Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra, never published in the composer's lifetime.

The Suite is one of the more extreme examples of Schoenberg attempting to combine a rigorous treatment of his new serial style with traditional musical forms. Scored for two clarinets, bass clarinet, violin, viola, cello and piano, it was written between 1924 and 1926 and is largely based on dance forms. The Overture is in three sections and is often hard-driven, though quieter interludes provide lyric relief. The second movement is vigorous and vibrantly rhythmic, and is entitled Tanzschritte (Dance Steps). The third movement is a wide-ranging set of variations that even takes time to quote a (tonal) song by Silcher, while the finale departs from orthodox serial practice by using the tone row (and its inversion) as the major melodic material. This isn't major Schoenberg, but it's also a much better work than one might think from the bad press it's had in the past. This performance is technically excellent, though I think sometimes Boulez pushes the music a little too hard, leaving it lacking a sense of repose in the slower sections.

The 1899 work Verklärte Nacht is, of course, one of the few pieces of Schoenberg to have become a popular concert hall favourite. Its musical language is luminously post-Brahmsian, and the complex structure of its single movement is easy to relate to models from the past (for example the Wanderer Fantasy, or the Liszt sonata). I prefer the string sextet version recorded here to the later version for string orchestra, but this performance lacks the last edge of lyrical intensity that is so necessary to bring across the work's rather heated emotional atmosphere.

The Three Pieces for Chamber Orchestra were written around 1910 but only found after a search of Schoenberg's papers after his death. Each of them lasts under a minute, and the most interesting is the unfinished third, which bears considerable technical and expressive similarities to the third of the Five Orchestral Pieces.

With so many recordings available of Verklärte Nacht, this disc cannot be recommended for that work. However, collectors seeking the Suite and/or the Three Orchestral Pieces have far fewer options, and at the comparatively low price this collection is worth considering.

The beauty of bleakness
The Suite, Op. 29, is a world in itself. It is absolutely harmonious and even melodious, ,but harmony and melody have been put upside down and right side left. Some will say it is right side wrong, but forgive them because they don't know what they are talking about. It is true he does not work on the basic notes of the scale but rather on their antagonistic second tier notes, background degrees. To end up on another note than the tonal sounds awkward, unbalanced, chaotic, but Schoenberg thus shows, demonstrates and illustrates the fact that all the music before him is just a convention that has been elaborated over some thirty centuries and that it has no naturalness at all. All music is man-made and then it can be de-constructed, re-constructed and even manipulated. Schoenberg thus manipulates tonal notes and basic rules dealing with them, but he also manipulates intervals and systematically works with undesired intervals, supposedly unharmonious intervals, both within the musical line of one instrument, or between the musical lines of two instruments supposedly playing together and there they definitely play one against the other in the orchestra. Chaotic they say? Absolutely not, except if you take chaotic in the meaning any physicist is going to give to that word when dealing with Brownian movement. But that chaos creates the most stable and ponderous, forbidding and imposing matter that can exist in the world. Schoenberg just implements that chaos to music and if you listen to it in order to rebuild the experience you may have in real daily life where everything is chaos and yet order at a higher level over this chaos you get fascinated and enthralled, but also awed and impressed. The piece entitled "Verklärte Nacht". Quite a different music there. Languorous, languid, mournful, lamenting with violins that can never stop crying their notes through the night, and at times that very languidness produces an excited state both strident and heavily rhythmic and Schoenberg achieves what only the Europeans could produce in that time when mono-rhythmic Western music was transformed in the USA and America at large by the multi-rhythmic music from Africa, of the slaves. That modern music, and this piece is here absolutely typical, develops a poly-rhythmic force by having the various instruments, the various melodious lines follow different rhythms. That creates some chaotic force, some force that seems to surge from within the sounds themselves, from the depth it creates in the music. The rhythms can be expressed by simple tempo of a musical line and its strong notes, but it can also be artificially created by some emphatic elements used to pound onto our heads, to beat down upon our vital rhythms, that of the heart and that of the brain. Strangely enough some moments of rhythmic tension boost our own inner rhythms. At other moments the violins create a vast movement gliding over the chaos, surfing on the waves of that untamed and unleashed chaotic mental ocean, and vision, and I should say visions, because every minute evokes a full situation or a complex clash or confrontation, or even a scrutinizing glance that penetrates the multiplicity of reality and tries to capture the various beats or paces. The text given along with this piece is nothing but the source of Schoenberg's inspiration but is not used in the music itself. The three closing pieces are so short. But they are brutally going against the grain of classical rules and harmony. And yet at times an instrument tries a sad and slow solo against that disharmony creating then a surrounding environment the water of some fishbowl in which the erratic notes and rhythm swim happily, or at least we want to believe they are happy.

Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines, CEGID