SFS to Release All-Berg Album

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

One week from today SFS Media will release its latest album of concert recordings by the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) led by its former Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT). All of the recordings were made during MTT’s tenure as Music Director, and the album is devoted entirely to the music of Alban Berg. This is the latest album to be released since this past July’s recording of two of MTT’s song cycles. As is usually the case, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders for this new release.

Berg’s life was relatively short (born on February 9, 1885 and died of sepsis, possibly induced by an insect sting, on December 24, 1935). Nevertheless, the selections for this album account for different stages of his career. The earliest of these is the so-called Seven Early Songs collection, which Berg composed while studying under Arnold Schoenberg. Written between 1905 and 1908, these songs were written for medium voice and piano, subsequently revised for high voice and orchestra in 1928. The vocalist for the SFS performances, which took place in November of 2018, was soprano Susanna Phillips.

Following his studies with Schoenberg, Berg composed three pieces for orchestra between 1913 and 1915. These were dedicated to Schoenberg and published as his Opus 6. To some extent these pieces may be viewed as Berg’s “laboratory notebook” prior to composing his first opera, Wozzeck, his Opus 7 completed in 1925. Each of the pieces has its own dark rhetoric, and the third of them climaxes in a blood-curdling explosion that portends the beatings and deaths that will subsequently be encountered in Wozzeck. These were performed in Davies Symphony Hall in January of 2015.

Berg’s last completed work was his violin concerto, composed in the year of his death. It was composed on a commission by Louis Krasner. However, it was inspired by the death of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Walter Gropius and Alma Mahler; and the concerto was dedicated “to the memory of an Angel.” The music can be taken as programmatic, beginning with her happy childhood in the first movement and then confronting her struggle with death and her ascent into Heaven in the second. Gil Shaham was soloist for the SFS performances, which took place in March of 2018.

All three of these selections are given perfectly satisfactory well-recorded accounts that reflect well on MTT’s talent for interpreting Berg’s music. That said, however, it is important to bear in mind that all of Berg’s orchestra music is richly textured. As a result, I do not think that I have yet encountered a recording of Berg’s music that lives up to the experience of listening the the selection in a concert performance. Thus, while there is more than enough to say about what MTT brings to his interpretations of Berg, comparatively little of those observations hold up very well under even the best of recording and playback conditions. At best these selections allow the attentive listener to become familiar with Berg’s scores as preparation for an opportunity to listen to the music in a concert setting.

The one possible exception to this assertion concerns the violin concerto. Only a few months after Berg’s death, Anton Webern conducted Krasner in an Alban Berg Memorial Concert with Section D of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. As was usually the case for any BBC concert offering, that performance was recorded; and that source material eventually found its way to a compact disc release by Continuum Records. While the audio quality clearly leaves much to be desired, the sympathetic listener should have no trouble attending to the signal with only minimal interference from the noise.