More Schoenberg from Pina Napolitano

One of the performers I have been particularly interested in following, even if I am limited to recordings, is the Italian pianist Pina Napolitano. During my tenure with Examiner.com, I was drawn to her work when I learned (and wrote about) the CD she released of the complete piano music of Arnold Schoenberg. Since that time her recordings have provided a broad account of repertoire, including two Brahms the Progressive albums on which the solo piano music of Johannes Brahms rubs shoulders with piano compositions by Alban Berg and Anton Webern.

Cover of the album being discussed (from the Amazon.com Web page)

At the end of last month, Odradek Records released Napolitano’s latest album, whose full title is Kammerkonzert: Music of Arnold Schoenberg. The first three of the four compositions on this album consist of arrangements that involve the piano. The first of these is the Opus 42 piano concerto, originally composed for full orchestra accompaniment, which was subsequently reworked by fifteen solo instruments by Hugh Collins Rice. That arrangement happens to be the instrumentation for Schoenberg’s Opus 9, his first chamber symphony, which is the final composition on the album.

The second arranged composition is the Opus 22 set of four orchestral songs, originally composed for soprano and large orchestra. Felix Greissle arranged all four of these songs for a baritone voice singing with a chamber ensemble consisting of a piccolo, a flute, a clarinet, a bass clarinet, a violin, a viola, a violoncello, and a piano. The final arrangement is by Schoenberg himself, who reworked the “Wood Dove’s Song” from his Gurre-Lieder oratorio for mezzo-soprano with violin, viola, cello, bass, flute, three clarinets, one E-flat clarinet, one bass clarinet, bassoon, contrabassoon, two horns, harmonium, and piano.

I have spent a fair amount of my life trying to get my head around the Opus 9 chamber symphony. Most recently, I have moved away from focusing on the “atonal logic,” preferring to enjoy the music for the transparency of its diverse instrumental sonorities. Where this new album is concerned, it seems as if Napolitano was similarly drawn to those transparencies and invoked them for her arrangements of piano work. The transparencies are particularly effective in providing context for the vocal music in both baritone Christoph Filler’s account of Opus 22 and mezzo Ida Aldrian’s performance of the “Wood Dove’s Song." The instrumental parts are performed by members of the Wiener Concert-Verein, led by conductor Michael Zlabinger.

Ironically, I found myself approaching the three arrangements as a “warm-up,” preparing my “listening chops” for my latest encounter with Opus 9; and, in the course of listening to this album, I realized that the final track on the album was finally beginning to make sense!