Alban Berg - Chamber Concerto

Alban Berg (1885 - 1935) - Chamber Concerto, for piano, violin, and 13 wind instruments (1923 - 1925)

I. Thema scherzoso con variazioni [0:00]
II. Adagio [9:45]
III. Rondo ritmico con introduzione [24:45]

Oleg Kagan, violin
Sviatoslav Richter, piano
Chamber Ensemble of Moscow Conservatory, Yuri Nikolaevsky (1977)

Alban Berg's Kammerkonzert, or Chamber Concerto, is a chamber work in three movements, lasting around 40 minutes if the repeat in the third movement is taken and 30 if it is not. It was composed for Arnold Schoenberg's 50th birthday, although the work was not completed until 1 year later.

"Alban Berg's Chamber Concerto (1923-1925) followed on the heels of the composer's greatly successful opera Wozzeck (1917-1922). Dedicated to Berg's teacher, mentor, and friend Arnold Schoenberg, the Chamber Concerto is a transitional work, marking the near-end of the composer's freely atonal period and approaching Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. The concerto, in fact, actually features a number of 12-note rows, though they are not yet used in a thoroughly systematic fashion. In the year following the concerto's completion, Berg finished the well-known Lyric Suite (1925-1926), his first extended work in the twelve-tone idiom. The Chamber Concerto is remarkable for the thoroughness of its organization; that is, it was composed with rigorous attention to minute details, and its structure is derived from a series of complex mathematical relationships. This is evident, for example, in the number of measures in each of the work's three movements. The first movement consists of variations that appear in alternating sets of 30 and 60 measures, totalling 240 measures; the second movement is exactly 240 measures long; and the number of measures in the final movement is equal to the sum of the measures in the first two (480). The work is both motivically and thematically highly integrated, with material from the first two movements returning in the final movement. The concerto is thus symmetrical and balanced in a manner associated less often with Berg than with Anton Webern, Berg's fellow Schoenberg disciple. The concerto has been described as a manifestation of Berg's early "constructivist" tendencies and is notable for the manner in which Berg combines atonal and twelve-tone music in the same work with ease."

"The first movement involves mainly the piano and the 13 wind instruments (with a brief appearance by the solo violin). For the theme of the movement, Berg uses German notation to musically spell out the names of himself and his two friends and fellow members of the Second Viennese School:

ArnolD SCHönBErG → A-D-E♭-C-B-B♭-E-G
Anton wEBErn → A-E-B♭-E
AlBAn BErG → A-B♭-A-B♭-E-G

Berg creates a 12-note row out of Schoenberg's name, prefixing it by the 'missing' notes of the chromatic scale. This theme is then treated to five variations, using the common manipulations of twelve-tone technique:

Var. 1 - Prime [2:09]
Var. 2 - Retrograde [3:56]
Var. 3 - Inversion [5:34]
Var. 4 - Retrograde inversion [6:58]
Var. 5 - Prime [7:50]

The second movement is a large palindrome, using primarily the Prime form of the row in the first half and the Retrograde row in the second half. The movement focuses primarily on the solo violin and 13 winds, though the turning point of the palindrome is marked by a brief appearance of the solo piano. In 1935, Berg arranged this movement as a separate piece for piano, violin and clarinet.

The third movement involves both soloists and the ensemble, and is a large rondo based on a returning rhythmic, rather than melodic, idea. Berg layers material from the first and second movements on top of each other in this final movement. There is an extremely large repeat of almost 175 measures in the movement that is often omitted in performances and recordings."

(sources: Wikipedia, AllMusic)

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