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1 CD -
8-557521 - (p) 2005
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THE ROBERT
CRAFT COLLECTION - The Music of Arnold
Schoenberg - Volume 3 |
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Arnold
SCHOENBERG (1874-1951) |
Six
a cappella Mixed Choruses
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Mein Herz in steten Treuen, Op. 49
(1948) - (Folk song, 15th century)
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4' 08" |
1 |
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Der Mai tritt ein mit Freuden, Op.
49 (1948) - (Folk song, 1545)
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2' 05" |
2 |
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Herzlieblich Lieb, durch Scheiden
(1928) - (15th century melody, text
unknown)
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1' 30" |
3 |
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Es gingen zwei Gespielen gut, Op. 49
(1948) - (Folk song, 1540)
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3' 21" |
4 |
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Es gingen zwei Gespielen gut (1928)
- (Folk song, 1540)
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3' 21" |
5
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Schein uns, du liebe Sonne (1928) -
(Folk song, 16th century)
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3' 50" |
6 |
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String Quartet
No. 2, Op. 10 (1908)
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° |
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29'
59" |
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Allegro |
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6' 37" |
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7 |
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Scherzo |
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6' 40" |
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8 |
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Litanei (text by Stefan George)
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°° |
5' 56" |
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9 |
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Entrückung (text by Stefan George)
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°° |
10' 46" |
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10 |
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Suite
in G for String Orchestra (1934)
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** |
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30' 01" |
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Overture |
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6' 09" |
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11 |
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Adagio
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5' 17" |
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12 |
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Minuet
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4' 46" |
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13 |
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Gavotte
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6' 09" |
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14 |
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Gigue
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7' 40" |
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15 |
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SIMON
JOLY SINGERS *
Robert
CRAFT, Conductor
FRED SHERRY
STRIN QUARTET °
Jennifer
Welch-Babidhe, Soprano
°°
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Ida Kavafian, Violino I
- Erin Keefe, Violin II
- Paul Neubauer, Viola
- Fred Sherry, Cello
TWENTIETH
CENTURY CLASSICS ENSEMBLE (NEW
YORK) **
Jennifer Frautschi, Violin
Richard O'Neill, Viola
Fred Sherry, Cello
Robert
CRAFT, Conductor
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Luogo
e data di registrazione |
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Anney
Road, London (england) - 28 April
2005 (Six a cappella Mixed
Choruses)
The American Academy of Arts and
Letters, 155th Street and
Broadway, New York (USA):
- January 2005 (Op. 10)
- November 2004 (Suite in G for
String Orchestra) |
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Registrazione:
live / studio |
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studio |
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Producer |
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Philip
Traugott
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NAXOS Edition |
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Naxos
- 8.557521 | (1 CD) | LC 05537 |
durata 78' 18" | (p) 2005 | DDD
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KOCH previously
released |
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Nessuna
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Cover |
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The
Unfolding by Ultich Osterloh
(courtesy of the artist)
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Note |
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This third volume of
the Naxos Robert Craft Schoenberg
Collection features music written
over a period of forty years. The
Six A Cappella Mixed Choruses,
miniature polyphonic masterpieces,
are popular sixteenth-century
German folk-songs harmonized by
Schoenberg according to his own
dictates. The String Quartet
No. 2, heard on this
recording in its original form
with the two concluding vocal
movements, is an enthralling
combination of voice and quartet.
His first American composition,
the Suite for Strings in G,
was written “in the old style” as
a piece for young students, but
its technical difficulty has led
to it remaining practically
unknown.
Six a cappella Mixed Choruses
In August 1928 the “State
Commission for the Folksong-Book
for Youth,” Berlin, invited
Schoenberg to arrange (harmonize)
three sixteenth-century popular
German folk-songs according to his
own dictates. Schoenberg became
deeply absorbed in the work and
created three miniature polyphonic
masterpieces. In Los Angeles in
1948 he decided to compose three
more of these choruses in the same
style.
String Quartet No. 2, Op. 10
Schoenberg began the composition
of his second, F sharp minor,
string quartet, Opus 10, in
Vienna, on 9th March, 1907. The
four movements were not written in
chronological order, the first
having been composed more than a
year before the others. The third
movement, Litanei, was completed
on 11th July, 1908, the second
movement (Scherzo) on 21st July,
1908, and the whole piece was
completed on 1st September, in
Gmunden. In the summer, some time
before this, the 25-year-old
painter Richard Gerstl, a keen
musician, student of philosophy
and of Greek and Latin, eloped
with Schoenberg’s wife Mathilde.
Three months afterward, in
November, blaming himself for the
flagitious act, Gerstl committed
suicide. He had been living in a
rented studio in the same building
as the Schoenberg apartment, had
painted both of them, and given
lessons to Schoenberg in the
painter’s art, but also developing
a passion for his wife, who was
nine years younger than the
composer. Largely through the
mediations of Webern, she was
persuaded to return to him, and he
to accept her, but her maternal
feelings for their two very young
children must have been her most
compelling reason. Schoenberg’s
diaries about the experience
(published in Allen Shawn’s superb
book about the composer)1 are a
revelation of his acrobatic
psychological processes and the
impregnability of his ego.
The two vocal movements that
conclude the quartet, Litanei and
Entrückung, presage a new world in
Schoenberg’s musical development,
the feeling of “air from another
planet”, as a line in Entrückung
puts it. The present writer cannot
say whether or not the music was
composed during or after these
tempestuous events, but in any
case, the quartet is dedicated “To
My Wife”. It was performed by the
Rosé ensemble in the
Bösendorfersaal, Vienna, 21st
December, 1908, with Frau Marie
Gutheil-Schoder singing the
settings of the Stefan George
poems. These movements mark
Schoenberg’s greatest advance in
harmonic discovery and sensitivity
thus far in his life: every chord,
progression, combination of
pitches, is utterly new and
unerringly right, and the quiet,
deliquescent string introduction
to Entrückung, and the enthralling
combination of voice and quartet
throughout are a peak in early
twentieth-century music.
Schoenberg’s attraction to George
is a subject for a writer with
deep knowledge of German as well
as music, and a book-length study
of the interrelation is long
overdue. The present writer has
chosen to present the Quartet, Op.
10, in its original form and not
in Schoenberg’s 1929 string
orchestra version for the reason
that the latter tends to
overweight the bass line where it
doubles the cello. Further, the
vocal movements contain some of
the most inward Schoenberg ever
wrote; Opus 10 does not make
public statements.
Suite for Strings in G
Schoenberg’s first American
composition is in five movements:
Overture (11), Adagio (12), Minuet
(13), Gavotte (14), and Gigue
(15). In August 1934, after a
bitter winter in Boston, the
composer visited the summer music
school at Chautauqua, New York, at
the invitation of one of its
directors, the Australian pianist,
Ernest Hutcheson, who had studied
at the Leipzig Conservatory in the
1880s, and whom the composer had
known and befriended in pre-World
War I Germany. Coincidentally,
Hutcheson was president of the
Juilliard School of Music in New
York, and hoped to engage
Schoenberg to teach there. The
Boston experience had convinced
him that the New York climate
would be too severe for him, but,
needing a source of income, he
asked Hutcheson to postpone, not
withdraw, the offer. In a letter
to his brother-in-law discussing
possible salaries, which Hutcheson
feared might be exorbitant —
Schoenberg’s reputation as a
teacher was unparalleled — the
composer coyly remarks: “True,
they don’t know how cheap I’d be”.
Ultimately he moved to the more
salubrious climate of southern
California. Informing Hutcheson of
this decision in a letter of 28th
March, 1935, Schoenberg adds a
further reason, which should
interest culture historians: the
inadequacy of the average American
music student’s “basic grounding”:
I was always very
dissatisfied with the European
student’s qualifications …
[but] I did usually find that
there was at least a certain
fairly general knowledge of
the works of the masters … in
the main lacking here.… The
high price of printed music …
makes it impossible for most
students to own even a
rudimentary collection of
something like the 200 volumes
that all but the poorest had
in Austria.
While at
Chautauqua, Schoenberg met Martin
Bernstein, a young double-bass
player from New York University,
who induced him to write a piece
for young players of the near
future, whom American high school
and college orchestras were
beginning to train. Schoenberg,
wholly unaware of the primitive
level of music training in
American institutions at the time,
wrote:
I have the belief that
all composers, especially
modern composers, and very
especially I, should be
interested in the promotion of
such endeavours. For here one
can lay the foundations of a
new artistic culture, here
young people can be given
possibilities of understanding
the new fields of expression
and the means which are
suitable for these.
Toward the
end of August, Schoenberg began
work on his “Suite written in the
old style for string orchestra”,
and by 7th September had sketched
the stretto of his first-movement
fugue. “Alten stile” must be
understood as pertaining more to
the eighteenth-century dance forms
of the pieces than to the
contrapuntal, harmonic, rhythmic,
and instrumental aspects. The
Gavotte was completed on 11th
October, the Minuet on 23rd
October, the Adagio on 6th
November, and the entire work on
26th December at “5860 Canyon
Cove, Hollywood”, according to his
inscription in the score. The
first performance was given by the
Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra
conducted by Otto Klemperer on
18th May, 1935. At the bottom of
the title page of the manuscript,
now in the collection of Dr Arthur
Wilhelm in Basel, the composer
wrote in red pencil: “The spots in
this score are Klemperer’s drops
of sweat”. In fact, Klemperer and
his professional players found
this “student level” opus
extremely difficult to perform,
for which reason it is still,
seventy years later, practically
unknown.
No programme notes seem to be
necessary apart from a
characteristic foreword by
Schoenberg, not found in the
score:
This is what I had to
achieve. I had to prepare [the
students] using harmony which
leads to modern feelings, for
modern performance techniques.
Fingerings, bowings, phrasing,
intonation, dynamics — all
this should be developed
without the introduction of
insuperable difficulties. But
modern intonation,
contrapuntal technique and
phrase formation were also to
be emphasized, so that the
student might gradually come
to realise that “melody” does
not consist only of those
primitive unvaried symmetrical
structures which are the
delight of mediocrity in all
countries and among all
peoples.… In doing this, I was
guided by my personal
knowledge of the stringed
instruments.
An
analysis should enrich the
knowledge of the players, but
it should also be informative
for their teacher and
conductor. Today, so many call
themselves conservative who
have nothing to conserve
because they possess nothing
that is worth conserving, not
even the capacity to write a
fugue like the one in this
work. Therefore they maintain
and conserve only their own
incapacity and ignorance; they
want to protect themselves and
others from the possibility
that new things should ever be
said which would call for at
least one prerequisite:
technical competence.
Robert Craft
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