Arnold Schoenberg - Violin Concerto; Verklärte Nacht (Isabelle Faust)

Information

Composer: Arnold Schoenberg

• (01) Violin Concerto, Op. 36
• (04) Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4

Isabelle Faust, violin

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Daniel Harding, conductor

Anne Katharina Schreiber, violin
Antoine Tamestit, viola
Danusha Waskiewicz, viola
Christian Poltéra, cello
Jean-Guihen Queyras, cello

Date: 2020
Label: harmonia mundi
http://www.harmoniamundi.com/#!/albums/2586

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Review

Schoenberg’s Violin Concerto can be heard as his typically defiant response to a period of exceptional stress and strain. In 1933, at the age of 58, he was deprived of his professorship in Berlin, and his attempts to establish a new life with his family in America were bedevilled by poor health and offers of unsuitable employment. Only in 1936 did he settle in Los Angeles and it was there, in September, that he finished the concerto, which he’d begun the previous year. No other composition of his – not even the Fourth String Quartet, written at the same time – has quite as powerful a mix of lyrical vulnerability and energetic assertiveness, though the unfinished opera Moses und Aron (begun in 1930 and constantly in his mind thereafter) is evidently a work of the same hand.

That Schoenberg dedicated the Concerto to his pupil Anton Webern could have been a warning as well as a mark of respect – a warning about all that Webern seemed to have renounced in his search for distance between his own compositional style and the great traditions of the classical past which Schoenberg sought to preserve through transformation. That this preservation was a constant struggle will be clear to any violinist tacking this concerto, and there is obviously a better chance in recording than live in concert of avoiding the sense of fingers tending to run ahead of themselves in the ferocious cadenzas that feature in the outer movements. During the past decade or so, recordings by Hilary Hahn and Rolf Schulte have done excellent service in showing that, for all its difficulties, this really is music rather than an arid technical exercise; and for the 2020s Isabelle Faust performs the same function, with admirably alert support from the Swedish RSO under Daniel Harding. Building to its tersely triumphant final cadence, the whole performance is superbly sustained, and as convincing in the reticent eloquence of the central Andante as in the turbulent fireworks that dominate elsewhere, in the orchestra as much as in the solo part.

The range of instrumental colours conveyed by Harmonia Mundi’s excellent recording of the Concerto cannot be matched in Verklärte Nacht, especially in the original string sextet version, shorn of the weighty double basses and opulently enriched textures of Schoenberg’s later string-orchestra arrangement. Yet only in the sextet version can the full interactive, individual virtuosity of this music be realised. Isabelle Faust and her colleagues achieve miracles of coordinated flexibility, making the ultimate advance into Schoenberg’s serenely shimmering coda a truly magical experience.

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone

More reviews:
MusicWeb International  RECORDING OF THE MONTH
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/feb/27/schoenberg-violin-concerto-verklarte-nacht-review-isabelle-faust
https://www.allmusic.com/album/schoenberg-violin-concerto-verkl%C3%A4rte-nacht-mw0003345269
https://www.amazon.com/Schoenberg-Violin-concerto-Verklarte-Nacht/dp/B082PQ9T4W

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Arnold Schoenberg (13 September 1874 – 13 July 1951) was an Austrian composer, leader of the Second Viennese School. Schoenberg was known early in his career for simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German Romantic styles of Brahms and Wagner. Later, his name would come to personify innovations in atonality that would become the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, Schoenberg developed the twelve-tone technique, an influential compositional method of manipulating an ordered series of all twelve notes in the chromatic scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg

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Isabelle Faust (born 1972 in Esslingen) is a German violinist. She trained with Christoph Poppen and Dénes Zsigmondy. Faust won First Prize in the 1993 Paganini Competition in Genoa, Italy. Since 1996, she has performed on the "Sleeping Beauty" Stradivarius violin of 1704, on loan from Landesbank Baden-Württemberg. Faust has performed as guest soloist with most of the world's major orchestras and won multiple awards for her recordings, mostly on Harmonia Mundi. She is a proponent of new music and has given world premieres of works by, among others, Olivier Messiaen, Werner Egk, and Jörg Widmann.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabelle_Faust

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