Schoenberg/Stravinsky/Shostakovich

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night)

Schoenberg has become, for many concert music listeners, the poster child for everything that’s wrong with twentieth century music—his music is often dissonant, angular, oppressive, and humorless. Less apparent is the fact that Schoenberg saw himself as a natural outgrowth of the German musical tradition, reaching back to Bach and continuing through Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Wagner and Brahms. This work, for string sextet, is an early work of Schoenberg’s, and if you listen to this piece just after hearing Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll or one of Brahms’ late piano works, you’ll hear the connection. This is hyper-expressive, hyper-romantic music that drips with emotion.

Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), “Berceuse” from L’oiseau de Feu (The Firebird)

Probably the most famous concert music composer of the twentieth-century, Stravinsky wrote the music for three ballets at the start of his career that are regularly performed by orchestras throughout the world. Two of these ballets were heard recently in northeast Iowa: Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring), by the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony Orchestra, and L’oiseau de Feu (The Firebird) by the Luther College Symphony Orchestra. In this phase of his creative career, Stravinsky turned to Russian folk music for inspiration, and that’s the source of the bassoon melody you hear in this gorgeous music.

Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major, Op. 102 (II. Andante)

Shostakovich was the premiere symphonic composer of the mid-twentieth century, completing fifteen symphonies, two concerti for both piano and cello, numerous film scores, and a wealth of shorter pieces. He was also prolific as a composer of solo and chamber music, completing fifteen string quartets. The work I have chosen to demonstrate Shostakovich’s melodic gift is the second movement of his second piano concerto, composed in 1957 for the composer’s son, Maxim. The interaction between the simple piano melody and the sustained sound from the string section recalls many slow movements from Mozart piano concerti.