A few years ago I took a ‘Which major work of Alban Berg are you?’ test*, and came out as the Chamber Concerto. I’m not sure this was very flattering, as the Chamber Concerto has the reputation of being the driest and most impenetrable of Berg’s major works, and is the least often performed and broadcast. I realised about ten years ago that it was the only work by Berg that I didn’t know at all, and resolved not to listen to it until I could get to a live performance. I finally managed to hear one at the RFH last Sunday night, performed by Mitsuko Uchida, Christian Tetzlaff and wind players from the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen.
I hadn’t really known even what was meant by ‘Chamber Concerto’. It turned out to be an instance of a form that has never quite gone away, the double concerto, in this case for piano and violin. The accompanying orchestra consists of thirteen wind soloists – no opportunity for lush Viennese strings here. (The first flute becomes the leader of the orchestra, at least for the purposes of hand-shaking.) This performance belied the piece’s reputation because it was full of passion and drama, though it was still not easy to grasp on a first hearing. The sound-world seemed to me to have more in common with the works which follow it than those which precede, and in particular it was hard not to hear anticipations of the violin concerto in the central movement.
The concert opened with Mitsuko Uchida playing Berg’s Op. 1 piano sonata. I have a recording of her playing this, but this live performance was rather less restrained, though with a great transparency in the more thinly-textured passages.
These days programme notes about Berg’s music have a lot to say about the numeric and other codes in it (plenty of these in the Chamber Concerto!), perhaps to appeal to readers of the Da Vinci Code generation. This is the aspect of his music that interests me least, because usually it is undetectable in performance. In this particular piece the melody which encodes Schoenberg’s name anticipates Shostakovich’s use of the same device.
The second part was Mahler’s Ninth. Recordings can’t do justice to the huge climaxes and contrasts in the first movement in particular. After the first half, I suddenly had to adjust to listening to a far larger ensemble, and the effect of hearing the symphony after two works by Berg was to emphasise the differences between the two composers. Normally in performances of Mahler 9 I hear the similarities. Perhaps this particular interpretation was just a little too cautious, and there seemed to me to be some minor tuning problems towards the end of the second movement.
There are online reviews of the concert from the Guardian, Times, Sunday Times and Financial Times, which bear out my impressions, and it’s still available on Radio 3’s Listen Again till March 31st. Mitsuko Uchida is playing Berg’s Sonata again at St. George’s, Bristol on Friday April 3rd. And the Chamber Concerto is being conducted by Daniel Barenboim in the 2009 Proms season, on August 21st. It is also featured in ‘Discovering Music’ on Radio 3 on May 3rd.
*I don’t particularly recommend this test; it’s not nearly as good as, for example, Which Dead Russian Composer Are You? Maybe I just don’t get the references to American popular culture in the questions.