Founded by the composer and conductor Beat Furrer in 1985, Klangforum Wien is now regarded as one of Europe’s finest new-music ensembles. But, for its first visit to the Wigmore Hall in London, the Vienna-based chamber orchestra brought two programmes that focused on what was new a century ago, when, on either side of the first world war, the Austrian capital was the epicentre of modernism in music.
In the second of Klangforum’s concerts, though, only the work that ended the concert, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire truly belonged to that revolutionary movement. The first half had been made up of pieces by composers who were very much watchers from the sidelines of modernism, who borrowed some of its tendencies without fully embracing them.
Franz Schreker’s strange little “dance allegory” Der Wind, for a quintet of clarinet, horn, piano and strings, from 1909, parades some strikingly original colours alongside moments of pure romantic kitsch, while Hanns Eisler’s Divertimento for wind quintet, composed in 1923 while he was still studying with Schoenberg, was one of the first works to adopt his teacher’s newly formulated 12-note technique, yet could almost be a lighter-weight, wittier version of Schoenberg’s own wind quintet. There was also Busoni’s Berceuse Elégiaque, in an arrangement for chamber orchestra that Erwin Stein made for Schoenberg’s Society for Private Music Performances, and which involved all 12 Klangforum players in reproducing the lusciously honeyed textures.
Vimbayi Kaziboni conducted the Busoni, and also took charge of Pierrot Lunaire, in which the soloist was the mezzo-soprano Barbara Kozelj, whose wonderfully lucid delivery of the text favoured the gesang end of the Sprechgesang spectrum. The odd touch of winsomeness aside, her performance was wonderfully assured but not at all theatrical.
The most vivid imagery came from the ensemble, especially the cellist Andreas Lindenbaum, who added real sepulchral gloom to the eighth movement, Nacht, and led off the grotesquerie in the 16th, Gemeinheit! (Atrocity). But all five instrumentalists ensured that every fleck of colour in Schoenberg’s feverish score registered, so that for once music and words seemed perfectly fused, just as they should be in what is one of the great precursors of late 20th-century music theatre.
