Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw

[ardcarp]

I caught the beginning of Afternoon on 3 by chance on the car radio. It was recorded in Coventry Cathedral as part of the 50th anniversary series. I was quite bowled over by A Survivor from Warsaw, a short piece for orchestra, male chorus (who only sang towards the end and in unison) and narrator. The latter, Omar Ibrahim (a one-time chorister at Coventry) was absolutely superb. It was in Scoenberg's sprechstimme or sprechgesang style. Omar had a wonderful voice and amazing diction. Even if you don't think you like this sort of thing, do give it a whirl. It is very striking.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01msmmd

You might have to wait for a bit of a Szymanowsky quartet from the preceding programme to end.

The programme also included a cantata by Bliss which was apparently ditched from the original consecration concert. I haven't got round to hearing that yet.

[teamsaint]

I caught the beginning of Afternoon on 3 by chance on the car radio. It was recorded in Coventry Cathedral as part of the 50th anniversary series. I was quite bowled over by A Survivor from Warsaw, a short piece for orchestra, male chorus (who only sang towards the end and in unison) and narrator. The latter, Omar Ibrahim (a one-time chorister at Coventry) was absolutely superb. It was in Scoenberg's sprechstimme or sprechgesang style. Omar had a wonderful voice and amazing diction. Even if you don't think you like this sort of thing, do give it a whirl. It is very striking.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01msmmd

You might have to wait for a bit of a Szymanowsky quartet from the preceding programme to end.

The programme also included a cantata by Bliss which was apparently ditched from the original consecration concert. I haven't got round to hearing that yet.

The Bliss was interesting, as was the story surrounding the ditching.
I was listening in the car, and missed some of it. The orchestral intro was very striking, and the interplay of the orchestra, organ, choir and soloists seemed to be skilfully and effectively worked....but , much closer listening needed, I would deffo give it another listen, plenty to enjoy, though not every aspect was to my taste. But a work well worthy of some more exposure, I think.
Edit , Missed the Schoenberg, but you have whetted my appetite.....

[Petrushka]

For a piece so short (it lasts just under 8 minutes) A Survivor from Warsaw packs a hefty emotional punch especially when heard live. The moment when the male chorus enters is as moving and uplifting as anything in music.

I've only caught it twice in the concert hall: John Shirley-Quirke/LPO/Tennstedt and Benjamin Luxon/CBSO/Rattle.

Anyone looking for a recording can try VPO/Abbado, Boston SO/Leinsdorf, BBCSO/Boulez or Dresden Staatskapelle/Sinopoli. Not sure of availability but all are excellent and are the ones I have.

[ardcarp]

Thanks for the recommendations, Petrushka.

On the subject of the Bliss, which I've now heard (and for the first time) I was quite surprised by it. One imagines Sir Arthur to have been a neo-Romantic, but the Beatitudes were really quite gritty in parts. One really needs to hear such a piece several times to get the measure of it. There's quite a good Wiki entry about him.

[AmpH]

An informative concert review is available here :-

http://www.seenandheard-international.com/2012/09/23/the-beatitudes-in-coventry-cathedral-50-years-late/

For those who are interested, a more detailed article about The Beatitudes is available here :-

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2012/July12/Bliss_Beatitudes.htm

I was due to attend this concert, but unfortunately illness prevented me from doing so. Looking forward to catching up with this on iPlayer.

[kernelbogey]

The Schoenberg A Survivor from Warsaw was the first item in the concert broadcast in TTN at 0300 this morning 10 June 2023. I had never heard it in full before and it is certainly a striking, powerful work. Three a.m. was perhaps not the best ilstening environment: in this broadcast it morphed, as it were, attacca into Mahler 7. I don't remember John Shea mentioning in his introduction that Schoenberg included an excellent Mahler pastiche, I thought before I realised what was going on!

[smittims]

I've always thought A survivor from Warsaw would go well in a concert with A Child of our time.

[Petrushka]

I've always thought A survivor from Warsaw would go well in a concert with A Child of our time.

Simon Rattle did exactly that in his 'Towards the Millennium' series in Birmingham on March 2 1995. The concert began with Pavel Haas's Study for Strings. I was present at the concert in Birmingham which was also televised.

[gurnemanz]

This work made a huge impression on me when I first heard it on Radio 3 as a student (studying German) over 50 years ago. The guard's barked-out words "Achtung! Still gestanden!" stuck in my head. As I remember, it was a concert which included Stravinsky's war-influenced Symphony in Three Movements.

[Serial_Apologist]

I am feeling so heartened amid these times that people I wouldn't have expected here have given thumbs up to one of Schoenberg's most radical works, and a twelve-tone-based one a that! Atonal music opened up the universe of music to previously untapped formal and expressive possibilities, acknowledged even by composers of more conservative stamp, yet both it and the twelve-tone and broader serial musics which some composers would expand into from it have received short shrift from much of the critical musical establishment for the past four decades, indicating a more general loss of faith in modernism as a whole, I would argue - and look just where the world is now!

This could be a start to forum members discovering for themselves the huge and variegated pallette of music in all genres of his time this amazing pioneer composed between 1897 and his death in 1951.

[Pulcinella]

I am feeling so heartened amid these times that people I wouldn't have expected here have given thumbs up to one of Schoenberg's most radical works, and a twelve-tone-based one a that! Atonal music opened up the universe of music to previously untapped formal and expressive possibilities, acknowledged even by composers of more conservative stamp, yet both it and the twelve-tone and broader serial musics which some composers would expand into from it have received short shrift from much of the critical musical establishment for the past four decades, indicating a more general loss of faith in modernism as a whole, I would argue - and look just where the world is now!

This could be a start to forum members discovering for themselves the huge and variegated pallette of music in all genres of his time this amazing pioneer composed between 1897 and his death in 1951.

Maybe a Summer BaL or Recordings in Discussion thread with some ideas for people on where and how to start would be a good idea?

PS: Just discovered that I have a recording of this after all. It's in the 5CD Rattle Second Viennese School set (though not listed on the front!).
Also later realised that there's a BBC Boulez version in the big Sony box.

RVW Sea Symphony in York Minster tonight takes precedence though, but I've left the Rattle set out to explore tomorrow.

[kernelbogey]

This could be a start to forum members discovering for themselves the huge and variegated pallette of music in all genres of his time this amazing pioneer composed between 1897 and his death in 1951.

I think its power comes not from the serial musical structure but the powerful evocation of the greatest atrocity of modern times.

The promotion of tweve-note music by such influential figures as William Glock, prominent in my teens, set my musical appeciation of twentieth century music back decades.

[RichardB]

The promotion of twelve-note music by such influential figures as William Glock

I don't think you or I or William Glock or anyone else can listen to a piece of music and ascertain how "twelve-note" it is.

[Serial_Apologist]

I think its power comes not from the serial musical structure but the powerful evocation of the greatest atrocity of modern times.

The promotion of tweve-note music by such influential figures as William Glock, prominent in my teens, set my musical appeciation of twentieth century music back decades.

I began to realise, albeit naively initially, that appreciating twelve-note music involves that of the whole tradition of Austro-German music from Buxtehude (maybe) by way of the Classics and Beethoven, then onto Schubert and the Schumann-Mendelssohn generation, Wagner, Brahms, Strauss/Mahler/Wolf'Reger, then the Second Viennese School. Weimar radicals such as HIndemith, Weill, Eisler and Hartmann, on to Henze and Stockhausen. That makes the most sense, for me, of modernist music following on after Debussy and Ravel's side-impact on the inter-war generation, particularly Bartok, who I always think understood the atonal aesthetic from his own early marination in Brahms and Strauss and took from it and the post late Beethovenian legacy what he needed in adapting folk musics into a modernist aesthetic. In their enfolding interrelatedness all these tendencies can be experienced as enriching each other. I always applied Seiber's advice in his guide to the Bartok quartets - listen to each one four times before going on to the next, and applied it to listening to what I managed to find available of Schoenberg's Late Romantic, Free Atonal, Twelve-tone and late tonal works, and those of Berg and Webern, alongside each other - which, admittedly, was a lot easier to do back when Glock was around than it would be following Radio 3 today. It resulted in what became a very rich multi-levelled way of listening to the Schoenberg school in particular, since it made it possible to experience the music as refractive of not only its own time but of all the history that had gone into it, which in turn led me back into listening to Brahms and late Beethoven, and hearing in them possibilities they could never of course have envisaged but were there waiting for their time, much the way that a 14th century peasant could never have envisaged the coming of capitalism and with it the rise of entirely new classes of entrepreneurs, working classes and so on. it has never prevented me from liking some of its products more than others: from a listening POV I have never fully appreciated for example Webern's Symphony Op 21 while of course respecting it; but the "world" of atonal and serial music is so broad and varied it would be very difficult for a committed listener to write it all off on the basis of one man's influence - and a promoter's as well!

[Joseph K]

I began to realise, albeit naively initially, that appreciating twelve-note music involves that of the whole tradition of Austro-German music from Buxtehude (maybe) by way of the Classics and Beethoven, then onto Schubert and the Schumann-Mendelssohn generation, Wagner, Brahms, Strauss/Mahler/Wolf'Reger, then the Second Viennese School. Weimar radicals such as HIndemith, Weill, Eisler and Hartmann, on to Henze and Stockhausen. That makes the most sense, for me, of modernist music following on after Debussy and Ravel's side-impact on the inter-war generation, particularly Bartok, who I always think understood the atonal aesthetic from his own early marination in Brahms and Strauss and took from it and the post late Beethovenian legacy what he needed in adapting folk musics into a modernist aesthetic. In their enfolding interrelatedness all these tendencies can be experienced as enriching each other. I always applied Seiber's advice in his guide to the Bartok quartets - listen to each one four times before going on to the next, and applied it to listening to what I managed to find available of Schoenberg's Late Romantic, Free Atonal, Twelve-tone and late tonal works, and those of Berg and Webern, alongside each other - which, admittedly, was a lot easier to do back when Glock was around than it would be following Radio 3 today. It resulted in what became a very rich multi-levelled way of listening to the Schoenberg school in particular, since it made it possible to experience the music as refractive of not only its own time but of all the history that had gone into it, which in turn led me back into listening to Brahms and late Beethoven, and hearing in them possibilities they could never of course have envisaged but were there waiting for their time, much the way that a 14th century peasant could never have envisaged the coming of capitalism and with it the rise of entirely new classes of entrepreneurs, working classes and so on. it has never prevented me from liking some of its products more than others: from a listening POV I have never fully appreciated for example Webern's Symphony Op 21 while of course respecting it; but the "world" of atonal and serial music is so broad and varied it would be very difficult for a committed listener to write it all off on the basis of one man's influence - and a promoter's as well!

The 'listen four times etc' thing is something I ought to do with those works.