Berg: Three Orchestral Pieces op. 6

[Barbirollians]

dorati is very fine .

[verismissimo]

What are all you people doing in my Living Room?

Don't think we'll be staying long, ferney. A year or two at most.

[mathias broucek]

Well that's my listening for next weekend sorted out.

I never got on with these pieces when I first encountered them as a teenager and have therefore not paid them much attention. My listening to the 2nd Viennese School has ever since focused on Schoenberg and Webern plus Berg's opera and vocal music.

Will spend some time with the lecture and then with the music itself (I seem to have Karajan, Abbado/VPO and Sinopoli on the shelves).

I too wonder about the Colin Davis - I'm a big lover of the BRSO...

[teamsaint]

On an associated subject, I suppose, I would love recommendations for the Schoenberg " 5 Orchestral Pieces" on CD please.

Odd, really, I've listened to it, and got a huge amount out of it online, yet never bought a disc. Time to put that right.

[Bryn]

On an associated subject, I suppose, I would love recommendations for the Schoenberg " 5 Orchestral Pieces" on CD please.

Odd, really, I've listened to it, and got a huge amount out of it online, yet never bought a disc. Time to put that right.

You could do a lot worse than kill two birds with one stone by getting:



However, if searching for it on amazon.co.uk, use "Dorati" and "pieces" as your search terms. They have made a right mess of the listing.

[Roehre]

Berg's opus 6 is one of my favourites.
I heard it completely unprepared in January 1977 for the first time: live. From the summer of 1976 I was immersing myself in "modern" (i.e. post-mahlerian) music, and the work shattered me completely.
The same week I bought the Karajan-2VS-set (great set, but with caution: e.g. in the Webern HvK multiplies the strings in the Symphony, in doing so removing its bite IMO, and Berg's Lyric Suite is far to lush to my taste).
Though I love these recordings, as I do the Dorati and especially the Abbado, there is one recording which hasn't made it commercially though the tapes must be in who owns now the Philips legacy: Haitink and the Concertgebouw.
There exist radio tapes as well as the ones which Philips made following the live performances.
The CD accompanies a book to celebrate Haitink's 70th birthday (1999) and combines the Berg with Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges.

That is my preferred recording.
Haitink approaches this work from its roots: being an aborted symphony, now essentially one grand arch exploding in the final moments of the march, a kind of precursor of Hartmann symphonies e.g.
Abbado does catch this too. But that's the element I miss in the Karajan as well as the Boulez or the Dorati.

[Bryn]

... The CD accompanies a book to celebrate Haitink's 70th birthday (1999) and combines the Berg with Ravel's L'Enfant et les sortilèges.

Can you offer the title of that book please?

[mathias broucek]

On an associated subject, I suppose, I would love recommendations for the Schoenberg " 5 Orchestral Pieces" on CD please.

I like Rattle but IIRC BAL picked Barenboim.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

You could do a lot worse than kill two birds with one stone by getting:

But my current favourite recording of the Schönberg would be Robert Craft with the Philharmonia on NAXOS (originally recorded for KOCH, if my memory isn't doing a Rattle/Berg!) - superb detail in the recording, and the performance --- Wow!

Boulez and Barenboim are marvellous, too - but Craft manages to combine the best features of both and bring insights entirely his own from the score.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Haitink approaches this work from its roots: being an aborted symphony, now essentially one grand arch exploding in the final moments of the march ... that's the element I miss in the Karajan as well as the Boulez or the Dorati.

Really?????!!!!! That would be precisely what tips the wink to Karajan for me - the grading of every climax in each Movement so that the quasi "final" one in the last movement (the one with the Mahlerian hammer blows) sounds absolutely catastrophic - AND THEN the last bars of the work which makes us realize that we'd had it comparitively easy! A bloody cudgel, made all the more devastating by Karajan's magnificent control of weighting and waiting.

(I would have said "unparalleled control", but I don't know the Haitink.)

[Bryn]

But my current favourite recording of the Schönberg would be Robert Craft with the Philharmonia on NAXOS (originally recorded for KOCH, if my memory isn't doing a Rattle/Berg!) - superb detail in the recording, and the performance --- Wow!

Boulez and Barenboim are marvellous, too - but Craft manages to combine the best features of both and bring insights entirely his own from the score.

My introduction to the Five Pieces was via the old Craft Columbia recording. Agreed, the more recent Naxos is very fine indeed.

[Barbirollians]

You could do a lot worse than kill two birds with one stone by getting:



However, if searching for it on amazon.co.uk, use "Dorati" and "pieces" as your search terms. They have made a right mess of the listing.

That's the one I have - a superb Lulu Suite too.

[Roehre]

Can you offer the title of that book please?

KORENHOF, Paul (samenst.)
Bernard Haitink. Een vriendenboek
Anthos Amsterdam 1999
ISBN 90 414 0341 8
333p. + CD (Berg/Ravel)

[Roehre]

Really?????!!!!! That would be precisely what tips the wink to Karajan for me - the grading of every climax in each Movement so that the quasi "final" one in the last movement (the one with the Mahlerian hammer blows) sounds absolutely catastrophic - AND THEN the last bars of the work which makes us realize that we'd had it comparitively easy! A bloody cudgel, made all the more devastating by Karajan's magnificent control of weighting and waiting.

FHG, that's exactly how I would describe the Haitink and what I'm personally missing a bit in the in all other aspects terrific Karajan.

Weird how perceptions can differ

[Roehre]

That's the one I have - a superb Lulu Suite too.

(The Lulu-symphonie an added CD-bonus as the LP only consists of Webern op.10, Schönberg op.6 and Berg op.6)