First Recordings: the Berg and Schönberg Violin Concertos, and More

The composers were two of the three leading lights of the Second Viennese School. One, Alban Berg, produced a work that is noted for its intense beauty and emotion. Arnold Schönberg's concerto is mainly famed for its difficulty - although it too is intensely emotional.

Krasner (1903-95) was born in Russia but moved to the US as a child. A New England Conservatory graduate and veteran of engagements in Europe, he commissioned Berg's concerto when he was just 32. Berg had some difficulty writing it, but soon, grieving over the loss of a family friend, young Manon Gropius, the daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler, he wrote his famous concerto, which he dedicated to "Dem Andenken eines Engels" ("The Memory of an Angel"). It was to be the last work Berg completed before his own death.

Krasner premiered the work in Barcelona in 1936, following Berg's death. The concert was to have been conducted by the third member of the Schonberg circle, Anton Webern, but in the event Hermann Scherchen led the orchestra. Krasner then took the work to London for a private concert with the BBC Symphony and Webern. That performance was recorded for the violinist and has appeared on record, albeit in fairly poor sound. In fact, I had refurbished a dub of that version, and old friend David Federman asked me if I would present it here. I'm waiting for a better copy of the release to arrive and then should be able to do so.

In the meantime, this post contains the first recording of the work, also performed by Krasner, with the Cleveland Orchestra and its then music director, Artur Rodziński, in 1940. It's quite a good performance, acclaimed upon its initial release on 78s and then on LP in 1954, when it was coupled with the Schönberg concerto, which Krasner had premiered in 1940 with the Philadelphia Orchestra and Leopold Stokowski. The Schönberg recording was in 1952 with the New York Philharmonic and Dimitri Mitropoulos.

C.J. Luten wrote in the American Record Guide: "The Berg concerto is a master's masterpiece: Krasner (for whom the work was written) and Rodziński give a devoted performance... It is intensely serious, deeply felt, and beautiful of sound. It also has an expressive coherence uncommon among the works of the Viennese dodecaphonists. 

"How different is the force of Berg's concerto compared with Schönberg’s (written in 1935 a year before the former). The Schönberg concerto (superbly performed and recorded) is deadly serious, darkly emotional, intensely intricate, and fiendish to play. Its expression is, however, ever so ambiguous; and its tortured invention ever so difficult to follow."

Not every critic was as baffled by the Schönberg. Arthur Berger, himself a leading composer, took to the Saturday Review and blithely opined: "I wonder if the unwarranted intellectual processes so often attributed now to the contemporary composer are not really, in many cases, in the mind of the listener - the calculated effort, namely, that we must exert in any new and challenging situation, whether it is the apartment we have just rented, the new route we take to drive to the country, or the strange language in which we order dinner abroad." Oh, OK.

Berger goes on to dismiss the Berg concerto as an comfortable piece: "[I]f its emotional appeal now seems thoroughly patent it is because, to start with, its moods were not particularly elusive - pervasive languor and desolateness gently fluctuating - and it is also because we no longer need exert ourselves much to grasp the idiom in which they are embodied."

Meanwhile, he faults the Schönberg because he "failed to use reason as a check upon feelings so abundant and intense that they overflowed the bounds of judicious form. Thus, instead of the impact of a well-unified structure, we carry away the memory of some lucid and imaginative scoring and of the tenuous quality of such passages as the approach to the first cadenza and the Mahleresque opening of the andante. Few details of the Berg are of such rarefied beauty."

The last words go to Alfred Frankenstein of High Fidelity: "[The Schönberg concerto] is colossally difficult for the soloist and almost equally difficult for the supporting ensemble and for the hearer, but what comes out of this collaboration is one of the most devastatingly dramatic symphonic compositions of the twentieth century. The Berg concerto, on the other hand, is a lyric work. As everyone knows, it was composed as a requiem for a young girl, and its mood is one of exaltation and ethereal expressiveness. No better contrast between Schönberg and Berg could be provided, especially since the performances are uniquely authoritative and masterly. Fine recording, too."

Louis Krasner was to go on to become the concertmaster of the Minneapolis Symphony from 1944 to 1949, during Mitropoulos' tenure there, and then a teacher at Syracuse University and the New England Conservatory. His lasting legacy is commissioning these two masterworks and several other notable compositions, including concertos by Alfredo Casella and Roger Sessions, and shorter works by Henry Cowell and Roy Harris.

A word about the LP cover: The 1930 drawing by Paul Klee is titled, "Ausgang der Narren," that is, procession of fools or jesters. It is may be an ironic depiction of carnival time, or it may be an oblique commentary on politics, but it is not related to the music. It is, however, preferable to the cover below.

In 2014 I posted another Schönberg work, his 1909 Expressionist monodrama Erwartung (Expectation), with soprano Dorothy Dow and again the New York Philharmonic and Dimitri Mitropoulos. I've now reworked the sound on that recording, which is backed by Ernst Křenek's Symphonic Elegy (In Memory of Anton von Webern), while greatly expanding the commentary.

There, too, I quote Arthur Berger: "Erwartung stems from an intermediate period separating Schoenberg’s frankly post-Wagnerian stage from his ultimate crystallization of twelve-tone technique. The Tristanesque contours evocative of love-death and frustration had not yet been subjected to the compression and abstraction that makes them, in his later music [e.g., the Violin Concerto], barely recognizable as such."

The work is not easy listening. C.J. Luten: "Erwartung is shocking, violent, and more than a little morbid. It concerns a mature woman, who, upon taking a midnight stroll through the forest, runs into the dead body of her lover. The words of the play are the thoughts which occur to the protagonist throughout the 25-minute course of action."

If this intrigues you, please do visit the original post for more information. The download link is both there and in the comments to this post.