Even now, almost 70 years after his death, the mention of Arnold Schoenberg’s name can be enough to provoke apoplexy in some quarters. Those people still hold him responsible for what they see as the irretrievable disconnect between 20th-century music and its audience; to them it was Schoenberg’s atonality and his invention of 12-note technique that started the rot.
It’s all nonsense, of course, and none of Schoenberg’s later music demonstrates more powerfully how much he revered the Austro-German tradition that he had inherited, and identified with it to the end of his life, than the two concertos he composed after he settled in the US in 1933. Neither the work for violin from 1936, nor the one for piano six years later, has become a regular part of the repertoire, but both unmistakably take the 19th-century concerto form as their model.
In the case of the violin work, the technical challenges of its solo part must have deterred some from performing it, but Isabelle Faust’s wonderfully accomplished performance makes light of those difficulties. As in her exceptional 2012 account of the Berg concerto with Claudio Abbado, Faust brings a fabulous range of colour and expressive nuance to this music, and Daniel Harding matches her understanding in the way he teases out the wiry orchestral textures around her violin lines.
The concerto is paired with Schoenberg’s earliest masterpiece, Verklärte Nacht, with Faust leading an impressive lineup of string players in the original sextet version. It’s a slightly detached performance – some groups certainly get more expressive mileage out of the work’s climaxes and more consolation from the statement of its famous D major cello theme – but it has a wonderful sense of coherence and continuity.
This week’s other pick
Deutsche Grammophon’s pairing of two of Thomas Adès’s most substantial concert pieces, with the composer himself conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra, largely confirms the impressions made at their premieres. The 2019 Piano Concerto, with Kirill Gerstein as soloist, still seems more like a gloss on the late Romantic concerto as perfected by Rachmaninov than a genuine attempt to rethink the form on Adès’s own terms. But the orchestral song cycle Totentanz from 2013, a setting of texts from a 14th-century German frieze showing Death inviting everyone from a pope to a young child to dance with him, seems more original than ever – a series of vivid, sometimes grotesque scenes, with baritone Mark Stone in superb form as Death and mezzo Christianne Stotijn portraying his successive victims.
