Search - Arnold Schoenberg, John Mauceri, Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra :: Schoenberg in Hollywood

You've got to love this disc just for its cover, a "colorized" black-and-white photograph which shows the composer in tennis shoes, wearing an implausibly pink short-sleeve shirt, playing ping pong. The message here is sun and fun in southern California, and the music that goes with it, dating from Schoenberg's years of residence in Los Angeles (1934-1951), scarcely sounds like it's the work of the man who wrote Verklarte Nacht and Pierrot lunaire and then gave us the 12-tone system. That is precisely the point. Schoenberg's horizons opened considerably following his forced emigration to the United States, partly by necessity (it seems no one was commissioning 12-tone works back in the 1930s and '40s, and Schoenberg had to eat), and partly out of what the liner notes refer to as the composer's "latent desire" to write pleasant, i.e. tonal, music. Schoenberg nonetheless took pains to minimize the importance of these essays and to preempt any suggestion that they marked a renunciation of his thornier style. Consequently, during the half-century since they were written, they have come to be doubly deprecated--as works of Schoenberg among those who dislike his music, and as bastard offspring in the eyes of the faithful. Alas, the Suite for String Orchestra really is pretty dreadful, and the Theme and Variations, Op. 43b, not much better. But both these pieces receive sympathetic readings from John Mauceri and his Berlin-based forces, as does the more widely-known Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38, a hybrid begun in 1906 and finished in 1939. The recorded sound, from two different venues, is first-rate. --Ted Libbey