Eric Berg

Daishin Kashimoto, Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, Zvi Plesser and Éric Le Sage, who have been close musical partners for years, joined forces once again at the Salon de Provence Chamber Music Festival to record this programme devoted to Viennese composers of the early twentieth century. The most famous and innovative of these are represented: Schoenberg with his Kammersymphonie no.1, Mahler with two lieder transcribed for flute and piano, Zemlinsky’s Clarinet Trio and several pieces by Berg. A disc that encapsulates both the exhaustion of a bygone Romantic age and the avant-garde promises of a modern world still to be built…

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.