It’s more than half a century since the London Sinfonietta was responsible for a festival at the Southbank Centre that featured the instrumental and ensemble works of Arnold Schoenberg alongside those of his pupil Roberto Gerhard. It was an extensive and thorough survey, which played an important part in establishing Schoenberg’s music as part of the modernist mainstream in Britain. But its effect has hardly persisted, and the 150th anniversary of his birth last month passed almost unnoticed here.
The Sinfonietta belatedly marked the occasion with a concert conducted by Jonathan Berman that included four works by Schoenberg. It was clear that these had been chosen to represent the different phases of his composing career, though why the programme needed “enhancing” by Theatre of Sound with stagey lighting, a haze machine, and readings from Schoenberg’s writings between the works, was less clear.
Had the performances been compelling, these effects should have been redundant. Perhaps it was a mistake to begin with one of the most awkward of Schoenberg’s early 12-note pieces, the Serenade, in which a setting for baritone of a Petrarch sonnet (sung by Richard Burkhard) is framed by a series of ensemble movements. In the right performance it can seem dance-like and upbeat, but here it was very hard going, sounding at best like wrong-note Kurt Weill, and at worst like the driest of academic exercises. Nor is the Ode to Napoleon, which accompanies a reading of Byron’s poem (Burkhard again) with piano quintet the most engaging of pieces, either, despite the hyperactive vehemence of the string writing, and it was left to pianist Andrew Zolinsky to provide a reminder of how brilliantly concise Schoenberg could be, with a quietly intense account of the Six Little Piano Pieces, Op 19.
The First Chamber Symphony should have ended the concert on a high – it’s one of Schoenberg’s greatest and most original achievements. But this performance seemed to lack the brilliance and precision the instrumental writing needs, just as an account of Webern’s Symphony Op 21 – one of two pieces not by Schoenberg in the programme, the other was Elisabeth Lutyens’ Webern-esque Six Tempi for 10 Instruments – seemed curiously tense and awkward. But what should have been a celebration of one of the most important and influential composers of the 20th century never rose above routine.
