At last, LA wakes up to Schoenberg
OrchestrasArnold Schoenberg found refuge in 1930s Los Angeles, but little else. The Philharmonic has persistently ignored the great modernist, making a rare exception for Verklärte Nacht but bypassing his major works.
Now, in the 150th anniversary of Schoenberg’s birth, the LA Phil has tipped its hat in two concerts in its 2024-25 season, rolled out today:
Schoenberg at 150
Arnold Schoenberg’s inventive approach to harmony left a lasting influence on the 20th century. Marking the 150th anniversary of his birth, the LA Phil explores the work of the Austrian-turned-Angeleno composer throughout the season highlighted by two performances of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder conducted by LA Phil Conductor Emeritus Zubin Mehta featuring soprano Christin Goerke (Tove), mezzo Violeta Urmana (Waldtaube), tenors Brandon Jovanovich (Waldemar) and Gerhard Siegel (Klaus-Narr), and speaker Dietrich Henschel (December 13 and 15).
The celebration continues with Schoenberg’s arrangement of Brahms’ Piano Quartet, part of the Ravel & Brahms series (February 13-16) that also includes Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major, and a chamber music program (December 3). The LA Phil is additionally working with the Arnold Schoenberg Center and the Schoenberg family to produce a temporary exhibit in BP Hall and print piece exploring the composer’s life in Los Angeles.
Other season highlights include:
Gustavo Dudamel leads 11 performances in Mahler Grooves Festival, including first performances of Symphony No. 7 with the LA Phil, Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Alma Mahler’s Five Songs; Festival also includes day-long Mahler-thon with YOLA and Colburn School musicians and listening parties in historic L.A. spaces
Seoul Festival, curated by Unsuk Chin, highlights modern Korean performers, composers, and culture
The John Williams Spotlight two-year retrospective continues, including Star Wars in Concert featuring music and film clips from the nine Star Wars saga films plus concerts with Gustavo Dudamel, Yo-Yo Ma and John Williams
Renowned Baroque conductor Emmanuelle Haïm begins her 3-year tenure as Artist-Collaborator with The Handel Project, featuring the LA Phil and Le Concert d’Astrée
Pan-American Music Initiative includes new Gabriela Ortiz commission, Día de los Muertos concerts, a John Williams Spotlight program featuring From Mexico to Hollywood: Golden Age Cinema, and LA Phil tour to Bogota, Colombia and New York’s Carnegie Hall
World Premiere of Carlos Simon’s Gospel Mass conducted by Gustavo Dudamel and with visuals by creative director Melina Matsoukas, a reinterpretation of a traditional Catholic Mass and an homage to the resilience and joy of the Black community
LA Phil joins Southern California’s landmark art event, Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative, with its day-long Noon to Midnight new music festival curated by Ellen Reid, featuring the world premiere of Doug Aitken’s Lightscape with the Los Angeles Master Chorale
pictured: Gershwin paints Schoenberg
Two easy ones, with tunes. How about the piano or violin concertos? Might frighten the dowagers, I suppose.
More like the young people now! There aren’t many dowagers around LA any more.
Even Boulez thought the piano concerto was a tedious exercise of tone row manipulations. I can’t find the source but I recall this was from a Salonen interview.
Apparently Alfred Brendel might disagree
Even Boulez can be wrong.
No!!
Sally
Well, at least Boulez thought of Schoenberg as historically necessary (in a musico-Marxist sense of helping the revolution along). His essay ‘Schoenberg est Mort’ sums it up. But he conducted all the orchestral work, not just the post-Wagner stuff the LA Phil are going to play.
No single piece of music is ever historically ‘necessary’. The whole notion is ridiculous….
I found old news releases about the LAPhil’s 2001 season-long “Schoenberg Prism” retrospective with a few seconds’ searching.
In addition to Verklarte Nacht, Mehta also recorded the Variations for Orchestra and the Chamber Symphony with the LA Philharmonic for Decca/London in the late 1960s.
Mehta also conducted the LA Phil in a very fine, and vividly recorded, disc of music of Varèse. Maybe they didn’t always like it much, but his audiences were listening to some challenging stuff to be sure.
I read that audience members were strapped to their seats for the occasion, to prevent them from prematurely leaving the hall.
The Mehta First Chamber Symphony with LA Phil players on Decca and YouTube is an ideal version of that masterwork.
That is absolutely true. This performance reveals the Beethovenian level of that stunning work, a musical highlight Schoenberg never reached again later-on. The most remarkable of that style is the synthesis of different forms of tonality and everything united in one tonal vision. He himself said in an interview in the thirties that he regretted to not have explored that style further since he felt there were still all kinds of possibilities there. He then tried to reconnect with his past with finishing his 2nd Chamber Symphony but that is a rather lame work in comparison. He could not find back the mental resources.
What he could have done after writing his 1st chamber symphony, was ‘going classical’ including his experiences so far, and that could have created a music that was both modern and classical, something like a ‘romantic neo-classicism’, different from Stravinsky’s, but well, that did not fit the Zeitgeist and his idea of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’.
“Persistently ignored”? When I lived in Los Angeles in the 1970s, I heard the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta perform Schoenberg’s “Gurrelieder” with Hans Hotter as the Speaker. They also performed Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto with Alfred Brendel as soloist. These memorable performances were in addition to their Decca recordings of Schoenberg, cited by Tom Varley. And don’t forget that the world premiere of the Brahms / Schoenberg Piano Quartet in G minor was given by the L.A. Philharmonic conducted by its Music Director, Otto Klemperer, in May1938.
Good season that will likely sell very well. But there is no clue who they might have in mind for their next music director. As far as I can tell only Salonen and Mehta get two concerts.
Great as Schoenberg was historically, in retrospect it seems he may be more of a transitional figure. Not so many really want to hear his mature music once auditioned.
A transitional figure? I’m not sure, but you might be right.
Like many composers, Schoenberg’s style changed throughout the years, but I think there is some truth to your comment about “not many wanting to hear his mature music.”
When his name is mentioned, the first thing that pops into many minds is the pre-twelve-tone atonal (or pantonal) music like Pierrot Lunaire, or one of his twelve-tone works like the Piano Pieces (Op. 33a). Music from these periods will always be liked by some, but I’m not sure if it will ever gain widespread acceptance.
On the other hand, I think his very early works (like Verklärte Nacht) and some of his later ones that feature a return to tonality (Suite for String Orchestra, Theme and Variations for Wind Ensemble Op. 43a, Chamber Symphony no. 2)
are the ones that are easiest for audiences to accept.
I think it’s not a coincidence that the works of his most “loved” and oft-heard are those whose vocabulary sports a direct line to Wagner. So many composers mined Wagner’s fount and came up with memorable, individual, and lasting results, yet I think by comparison AS was not quite as creative in that aspect as others.
Yet, the prelude to Gurrelieder is a very new take on Wagnerian writing, it sounds quite french.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imhEEGmHHxc
I don’t think it’s fair to suggest that the LA Phil has just woken up to Schoenberg. Klemperer conducted Verklaerte Nacht in 1934 and Schoenberg himself conducted the orchestra twice in 1935. The response to Schoenberg’s music seems to have been largely positive. Less so, his conducting.
It’s marvelous that Gershwin and Schoenberg knew and admired each other’s work. The final bars of Gershwin’s “Cuban Overture” seem to come close to a 12-tone row! I want to buy a book recently published called “Schoenberg: Why He Matters”.
I lived in LA from 1984 to 2000 and attended many concerts. Other than a performance of Gurrelieder (with Jessye Norman), I saw little attention to Schoenberg.
I think it’s well documented that he struggled to make a living in LA.
His manuscripts, housed and largely forgotten at USC, were finally moved from LA to the The Schoenberg Center in Vienna in 1998.
Ironically, the Schönberg Zentrum is housed in a beautiful classicist building which represented the non plus ultra of bad bourgeois taste for Schoenberg and the artists and intellectuals around 1900 when Schoenberg set-out to undermine all of that.
Good to see Gurre-Lieder and Handel operas on the list.
The next music director, Elim Chan, will probably bring even more Asian programming and artists.
Anyone going to Washington D.C. Opera in May to hear new ending of Puccini’s Turandot?
Gurrelieder and the Brahms-Schoenberg Quartet (premiered by them) are hardly new to the LA Phil. I’m surprised this most innovative of orchestras isn’t doing the less tuneful Schoenberg.
But it’s a pity the LA Phil didn’t adopt Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Miklos Rosza, Korngold, and any number of other “local” composers into their core rep.
With all due respect, they’re hardly going out on a limb with those pieces, are they?
Schoenberg’s ideas about music were all wrong, which is amply testified in Harvey Sach’s recently published book ‘Schoenberg, why he matters’.
Sachs wrote a great biography with everything there is to tell about the man and his music, and in the same time muses about the music’s problems and admits his grave doubts about its viability, thus undermining his intention as explained in the introduction, to give Schoenberg a place among the ‘greats’ of the repertoire. But that is not possible if the music is not accepted in the way the music of ‘the greats’ is accepted. Only the early works have entered the regular repertoire, and his atonal and 12-tone pieces never did, in spite of all attempts to make them more widely accepted.
The reason? Schoenberg considered music as something that had to be in tune with the developing scientific/rationalistic world view, defined by progress and continuous invention on the level of language. This is nonsense, as anybody understands who begins to think about it, and it forced him to create a language where a rationalistic method is applied externally, and not naturally emerging from the musical material. His way of thinking is thus comparable with the Western mindset which wants to subject Nature to exploitation and human nature to suppression. He did not understand anything of the nature of the art form. Compare with Debussy who understood everything about nature, and who avoided the mental trap Schoenberg found himself into.
I eagerly welcome any opportunity to hear Gurrelieder, and the Brahms/Schoenberg Quartet. But to say they are highlighting Schoenberg in a milestone anniversary year, without also offering at least the 5 Pieces for Orchestra, and Variations, should be considered a major snub. Surely the LA Phil audience has heard much craggier music than those?
Commemorating Schoenberg’s Legacy
Arnold Schoenberg, the Austrian composer who found refuge in 1930s Los Angeles, has often been overlooked by the city’s classical music scene. However, in a notable departure, the LA Phil has scheduled two performances of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, conducted by Zubin Mehta, featuring a stellar cast including soprano Christin Goerke and tenor Brandon Jovanovich. This marks a significant recognition of Schoenberg’s contribution to modern music and his connection to Los Angeles. Additionally, the season will feature Schoenberg’s arrangement of Brahms’ Piano Quartet as part of the Ravel & Brahms series, further highlighting his versatile talent.
Just released: The Los Angeles Philharmonic has decided to add the following five programs, each with a work composed by Schoenberg in the United States, mostly in Los Angeles together with some of his arrangements of works by other composers.
The exciting list follows:
PROGRAM 1
Concerto for Violin and Orchestra op. 36 (1934–1936)
Johann Sebastian Bach: Choralvorspiel: »Komm, Gott, Schöpfer, Heiliger Geist« (BWV 631) for large orchestra (1922)
Johann Sebastian Bach: Choralvorspiel: »Schmücke Dich, o liebe Seele« (BWV 654) for large orchestra (1922)
Johann Sebastian Bach: Präludium und Fuge in Es-Dur für Orgel (BWV 552) for orchestra (1928)
PROGRAM 2
Chamber symphony No. 2 38 (1906–1939)
Johannes Brahms: Piano quartet g minor, op. 25 for large orchestra (1937)
PROGRAM 3
Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte (Lord Byron) for String Quartet, Piano and Reciter op. 41 (1942) arrangement for Orchestra
Konzert für Violoncello und Orchester (D-Dur) nach Matthias Georg Monn: Concerto per Clavicembalo (1932–1933)
Max Reger: Romantische Suite op. 125 (1919/20)
PROGRAM 4
Prelude for Mixed Chorus and Orchestra op. 44 (1945)
Theme and Variations for Full Band (Orchestra) op. 43a & b (1943)
Konzert für Streichquartett und Orchester (B-Dur) nach Georg Friedrich Händel: Concerto grosso, op. 6 Nr. 7 in B-Dur (1933)
PROGRAM 5
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra op. 42 (1942)
A Survivor from Warsaw for Narrator, Men’s Chorus and Orchestra op. 46 (1947)
… just kidding
https://basiaconfuoco.com/2021/02/23/schonbergs-gurre-lieder/
Another take on Gurrelieder:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiGUkr51QdE&t=1047s