Z Berg Strange Darling

Herbert von Karajan was an Austrian conductor. He was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic for 34 years. During the Nazi era, he debuted at the Salzburg Festival, with the Vienna Philharmonic, the Berlin Philharmonic, and during World War II he conducted at the Berlin State Opera. Generally regarded as one of the greatest conductors of the 20th century, he was a controversial but dominant figure in European classical music from the mid-1950s until his death. Part of the reason for this was the large number of recordings he made and their prominence during his lifetime. By one estimate, he was the top-selling classical music recording artist of all time, having sold an estimated 200 million records.

Here's a recording that doesn't introduce its star name until it's more than half over, and works quite well on that account. The understanding of the opening work, Alban Berg's six-movement Lyric Suite (1926), has evolved since scholars discovered a secret copy of the work that, despite its use of the abstract 12-tone system, outlines a quite specific program depicting the course of the composer's extramarital affair with Dorothea Robetin the previous year. The finale was even shown to contain an unsung melody, a setting of a very relevant Baudelaire poem, and to be performable with the melody sung.

The Schoenberg Quartet displays a great affinity for Alban Berg's chamber music. The larger string quartets are masterpieces of the twentieth century and are here played with a a wonderful understanding of their constant shifts in mood. The shorter pieces are also perfect and give a new way of looking at the larger works that they are normally a part of. The viola and piano sonata is a good transcription from the clarinet sonata and also adds a new dimension to the original version.

Igor Levit’s new double album Fantasia features a wide range of works spanning a period of almost two centuries from 1720 to 1910 and showcases key compositions by Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Johann Sebastian Bach and Alban Berg. The starting point of the four paradigmatic works featured on the double album is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Levit has chosen Bach’s exceptional Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue in D minor and combined it with Liszt’s B minor Sonata, a highly charged piece that at the time of its composition looked far ahead into the future (which Levit is currently performing to great acclaim all over the world), together with Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica, in which Busoni perpetuated the Bach tradition, and Alban Berg’s only Piano Sonata.

Dwarfing even the late Beethoven quartets in sheer length, Schubert's final String Quartet in G major, D. 887, clocks in at nearly an hour of performance time. This ambitious length made it difficult to appreciate in Schubert's Vienna and can even be a test of focus for modern audiences if anything but a superb performance is put forward. Fortunately for listeners of this Onyx album, the Kuss Quartet produces just such a performance. The approach to Schubert offers far more drive, intensity, and grit than the vast majority of recordings available.

Recordings that include strings quartets by Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern are common, but an album that includes music for quartet and voice by each of them is a rarity. Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, with a part for soprano in its third and fourth movements, is standard repertoire, but the version of Berg's Lyric Suite with a vocal part in the final movement is highly unusual, and Webern's bagatelle with voice, an unpublished movement apparently once intended to be part of the Six Bagatelles, Op. 9, receives what is probably its first recording. Novelty aside, the high standards of these performances make this a formidable release. Founded just before the turn of the millennium, Quatuor Diotima plays with the assurance and mutual understanding of a seasoned ensemble. The quartet has a lean, clean sound and the ensemble is immaculate, playing with exquisite expressiveness, an ideal combination for this repertoire.