Est 1923

Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht;

Record and Artist Details

Composer or Director: Arnold Schoenberg

Label: Classics

Media Format: CD or Download

Media Runtime: 78

Mastering:

DDD

Catalogue Number: CD80372

Tracks:

Composition Artist Credit
Verklärte Nacht, 'Transfigured Night' Arnold Schoenberg, Composer
Arnold Schoenberg, Composer
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
Yoel Levi, Conductor
Pelleas und Melisande Arnold Schoenberg, Composer
Arnold Schoenberg, Composer
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
Yoel Levi, Conductor
My immediate impression was positive. Verklarte Nacht begins with exemplary quietness, the tempo appropriately measured. But a lack of inner tension soon becomes apparent, the pace increasingly leaden. These lovers seem to be negotiating a ploughed field rather than a moonlit forest, and the total duration—more than 35 minutes, compared to the more usual 28 or 29—tells its own story.
The disc is labelled ''The Romantic Schoenberg'', and Yoel Levi was evidently determined at all costs to shun the kind of intensity that might suggest anticipations of Schoenberg's more abrasive later style. The orchestra play well and many details of phrasing and dynamics are responsively handled, but the textures are forced into an over-blended homogeneity and the result lacks drama. This is an effusive yet ultimately rather cautious romanticism, and for performances which match warmth with urgency I much prefer Karajan's imposing full-scale reading, or the Orpheus CO's more intimate and subtle interpretation.
Levi's view of Schoenberg's romanticism is a little more persuasive in the expansive, doom-laden pages of Pelleas und Melisande, though caution again emerges in a fairly tame scherzo section, and the overall effect is to make the score seem more episodic than it need be, weighing down the textures, rather than highlighting the contrapuntal interdependence of the various strands. Boulez—with help from the Erato technicians—has shown how a balance can be struck in this complex score between clarity and integration: Karajan, too (on a three-disc set), offers a masterly demonstration of how richness of sound need not bring over-emphatic expression in its train.'

Schoenberg Verklärte Nacht;

Verklärte Nacht, 'Transfigured Night'

Pelleas und Melisande

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