Post Description

Alban Berg - Kammerkonzert für klavier und Geite mit 13 Bläsern
Stravinsky - Konzert Es-dur für Kammer-orchester "Dumbarton Oaks",  8 Instrumental-Miniaturen,  Ebony concerto.
Ensemble InterContemporain olv Pierre Boulez.
Although these are works not purely for Winds, the emphasys of the pieces is on woodwind and brass small ensemble playing. I had never listened to Berg properly before, but this piece gives a very good introduction to a composer who is often difficult to appreciate because even now the music sounds very modern and dissonant. However, under the direction of Boulez, you find yourself "getting" the piano and winds work and leaves you wanting to listen to more of the same. Boulez clearly has a unique insight into 20th century music and the Stravinsky works are superbly performed too. In particular the Ebony concerto.

When the Rite of Spring was premiered shortly before WW1 there was a bad-mannered riot in the theatre. 90 years later Stravinsky does not seem much more radical than Brahms, and I was surprised to see that all 3 of the Stravinsky items here are later in date than Berg's Chamber Concerto. Assuming then that Stravinsky is a fully accepted classic these days, maybe I can use his comparative popularity to do my little bit towards 'popularising' Berg, or at least reducing the level of antipathy and indifference to him. In the last resort if you still find you can't put up with him, you will always have a very good set of Stravinsky performances.
Persuading people to listen to Berg is not helped by supercilious remarks by Boulez that he is 'of course very romantic' or words to that effect. He is quite obviously not romantic in the way Strauss or Elgar are romantic, and I do not necessarily acquit Boulez of pseudism and affectation in talking like this. I guess that most people getting to know Berg start with the violin concerto which can, at a stretch, be called romantic in the familiar sense. For the chamber concerto this takes a bigger stretch, but I can still hear Brahms in it. What its idiom resembles is Schoenberg's two chamber symphonies, firmly across the 12-tone rubicon and full of the squawking effects that characterise the second Viennese school but not totally uncompromising like Schoenberg's concertos.