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SCHOENBERG AND BRAHMS -- TWO TRADITIONALISTS
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Schoenberg loved partaking of the stew of history, continually reworking old pieces for new ensembles, often changing the original a great deal. In addition to the powerful transcription he made of Brahms' piano quartet and works by J. S. Bach, he reworked a keyboard concerto by Georg Matthias Monn into a cello concerto and a Handel concerto grosso into a concerto for string quartet and orchestra. With all of these, he updated them into the present tense and brought out their most striking qualities.
As Daniel Barenboim says in the interview in Dialogue, "[The piano quartet transcription] doesn't tell us much about Brahms, but it tells us a lot about Schoenberg." We hear how he thinks a work like this should be orchestrated, and perhaps even how Brahms may have wanted it orchestrated. There is a German directness to the transcription that would not be there if, say, Debussy had undertaken an orchestration, nor the irony that Stravinsky would have read into the quartet.
All this knowledge of historical styles comes together in musicians such as Daniel Barenboim, Sir Simon Rattle, and the Berlin Philharmonic. Barenboim made his name interpreting the works so cherished by Brahms and Schoenberg, and attempts to place them in their historical context in his performances. His commitment to contemporary music is a logical outgrowth of his knowledge of Schoenberg, encompassing the composers who claim to follow in his footsteps: Boulez, Sir Harrison Birtwistle, and Elliott Carter, and others with similar styles. Barenboim has worked to communicate music's enduring value to all cultures through his East-West Divan Orchestra, which brings together young Israeli and Arab musicians in an attempt at both musical and cultural dialogues.
For their part, the musicians of the Berlin Philharmonic have long been recognized as some of the finest interpreters of the German composers, through their long associations with Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan, as well as with Daniel Barenboim, an ardent champion of both Furtwängler's sweeping conducting style and his compositions. Barenboim's love of music and the orchestra led him to play a concert with the Philharmonic on November 12, 1989, shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when he felt the people on both sides should be able to hear the orchestra.
Sir Simon has worked, since he took up his post with the Berlin in 2002, to energize the orchestra and has by many accounts turned it into a younger, sleeker, more dynamic ensemble, while not downplaying its illustrious past. He has programmed some adventurous contemporary scores beyond the German repertoire, such as "Blood on the Floor," an evening-length rumination on the nature of drug addiction by fellow Englishman Mark-Anthony Turnage.
We often think of history as static and kept between the covers of a book, only moving when someone comes along to give it a shove, like Beethoven, or Picasso in art or Vaclav Havel in politics. But this program shows how history is constantly evolving and changing shape before our eyes. That is what we hear when we listen to Brahms and Schoenberg, and especially Schoenberg's version of Brahms; it is what Barenboim has worked his entire career to communicate; and it is what Sir Simon is accomplishing with the Berlin Philharmonic right now.
Top banner photos: Sir Simon Rattle, the Parthenon atop the Acropolis, and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
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The Berlin Philharmonic's next Europakonzert, in 2005, is set for Budapest, Hungary. |
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Sir Simon Rattle, the Berlin's chief conductor, began his tenure with the orchestra in 2002. |
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The DVD of the concert is available from Amazon.com. |
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