The end of May will begin a three-week festival arranged by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony celebrating the music of Franz Schubert and Alban Berg. The press release for this event (available through the Press Releases page on the Symphony's Web site) includes an excellent sentence by Thomas about Berg:
The most extraordinary thing about Berg is that in every piece, there is always a moment that—even on first hearing, even to the unsophisticated listener—is so radiantly beautiful, that you think, "I must hear that again."
My only disagreement with Thomas is that I have yet to hear a Berg composition that has only one of those moments!
Fortunately, thanks to San Francisco Performances, that irresistible urge to hear Berg again will be triggered on April 21 in a recital by Czech mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená, accompanied by fellow Czech artist Karel Košárek. This program will conclude with the seven "early songs" ("Sieben frühe Lieder"), which predate his Opus 1 piano sonata and are probably the first results of his study with Arnold Schoenberg with which he was satisfied. The seven songs were composed over the period from 1905 to 1908, which overlaps which Schoenberg's composition of his first chamber symphony, listed in E major but definitely pushing the envelope of both the tonal language and the structures framing the "utterances." Personally, I find these all of these songs "radiantly beautiful" (as Thomas put at) and am very excited to be able to hear them in their original form with piano accompaniment and then hear Berg's orchestration of them (from 1928) about a month later.
Kožená has arranged her program in chronological order (with a minor twist) with Berg's songs at the end of the journey. Reversing the chronology, these songs will be preceded by Henri Duparc's "L'Invitation au voyage" setting of a poem from Charles Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal, composed in 1870. (For those who keep track of such things, today is Baudelaire's birthday!) Duparc will be preceded by Robert Schumann's Frauenliebe und Leben song cycle from 1840 (Opus 42), set to texts by Adelbert von Chamisso. The twist is that the program will open with a selection of love songs set by Henry Purcell, but in an arrangement for voice and piano by Benjamin Britten. The entire program should thus build up a fascinating context for listening to Berg that will probably serve us well when the Symphony begins its festival.
Further information about this event may be found at the Web page prepared by San Francisco Performances.
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