{"id":2615,"date":"2024-10-13T17:20:28","date_gmt":"2024-10-13T17:20:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ventil.rs\/blog\/life-style\/review-philharmonic-pays-tribute-to-schoenberg\/"},"modified":"2024-10-13T17:20:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-13T17:20:28","slug":"review-philharmonic-pays-tribute-to-schoenberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ventil.rs\/blog\/life-style\/review-philharmonic-pays-tribute-to-schoenberg\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Philharmonic Pays Tribute to Schoenberg"},"content":{"rendered":"


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When Arnold Schoenberg conducted the premiere of \u201cPelleas und Melisande,\u201d his symphonic poem based on the somber fairy-tale that inspired Debussy\u2019s opera, in 1905, it was in front of a hostile Viennese audience. Reviews were \u201cunusually violent,\u201d the composer would later recall, with one critic suggesting he be committed to an asylum and banned from all access to music paper.<\/p>\n

On Thursday the New York Philharmonic<\/a> under the assured direction of Matthias Pintscher performed the work in commemoration of the composer\u2019s 150th birthday. This time, it was followed by enthusiastic ovations. With luscious strings, swirling melodies and an effusion of chromatic yearning, this early work by Schoenberg contains little to offend contemporary ears. Even so, I noticed pockets of empty seats around me at David Geffen Hall, abandoned by their occupants after the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto performed in the first half of the program. For a core of the classical audience, Schoenberg is associated only with the atonal style he developed soon after \u201cPelleas\u201d \u2014 a departure from the harmonic logic that underpinned Western music for centuries and that continues to bewilder many listeners today.<\/p>\n

It is telling that the Philharmonic\u2019s main anniversary tribute to Schoenberg is a late-Romantic work that bears no resemblance to the music that made him famous. (On Wednesday, a concert presented jointly with Juilliard featured his Suite, Op. 29, an angular jaunt based on a 12-tone series; in May, a series of concerts will include another early work, the luxuriant \u201cNotturno.\u201d) The truth is that while Schoenberg\u2019s atonal pieces now garner near-universal respect for their technical originality, they seem no more loved than when first written. Still, it\u2019s worth turning the spotlight on \u201cPelleas\u201d because amid all the churning leitmotifs and Mahlerian climaxes the aesthetic tensions of the time are uncomfortably apparent.<\/p>\n

Symbolist writers like Maurice Maeterlinck, the playwright who wrote the \u201cPelleas\u201d source material, dissolved the narrative constraints of language to heighten the associative charge of individual words, much like abstraction in painting unleashed the power of color. (For an example of Schoenberg\u2019s own Fauvist painting, look up his a blue-faced self-portrait<\/a> from 1910 backlit in dusky pink.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n