You’ll see the Wind Quintet described as one of Schoenberg’s most forbidding early exercises in 12-tone technique, or as one of the most congenial. Not wishing to be cute, but isn’t it perhaps both at once? When its wide-arching, agonized-Webernesque intervals are phrased with the nonchalant grace the score seems to demand, you feel the paradox straight away, and the mismatch between surface lyricism and inner agitation somehow keeps the whole 40-minute monstrosity alive, even when there is no obvious character to it other than its compulsively knotty counterpoint.
The Houston performance is a tour de force. Both individually and as an ensemble the players have mastered the score, and they play it as beautiful, exciting music, rather than as a penance. They benefit from a wonderfully rich, yet clear acoustic, which also helps the timbre-play of Webern’s Concerto register more fully than I ever remember.
Eschenbach’s own playing of the Berg Sonata has some exquisite moments, notably after the big central climax around 7'00'' - 8'00''; but generally his pacing of the structure is rather ordinary, and his instrument sounds a little papery; there is a distracting mislearned B for G at 0'51''.
Much better are the Webern violin and cello Pieces, every nuance of their purgatorial half-lit worlds precisely placed. But this would be a very collectable disc for the sake of the Wind Quintet alone.'