Search - Schonberg, Webern :: Waltz Reflections

It's easy to consider the 12-tone movement's instigators--Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg--as iconoclasts who sought to shatter the late-Romantic mold into harsher, more scraping fractal units. But this CD offers an opportunity to see how the 12-tone triumvirate honored the past. At the most basic level, they honored the waltzes of Johann Strauss by simply reorchestrating them. On a side note, they did this to finance the very organization founded to upend the stodgy orchestral traditions of late Romanticism. These Strauss waltzes appear here as rearranged, harmonically telescoped delights. Schoenberg's "Kaiserwalzer" has interludes that foreshadow minimalism and still ring beautifully. Webern's "Schatzwalzer" finds tones between tones in a tension-building escalation that seems everywhere recursively dancing across the floor. Much of this is thanks to pianist Leonore Aumaier's crisp attack and the Vienna String Quintet's radiant warmth, especially in the violins. Then there are the two add-ons: Schoenberg's pretty "Weihnachtsmusik," a short, shimmering quintet that shows nary a hint of the revolution in his compositional mind, and Theodor Hermann Leschetitzky's "Variations for String Quartet," a sometimes thrillingly playful work that fits perfectly here. --Andrew Bartlett