Programme note
Anton Webern (1883-1945)
Concerto for nine instruments, Op 24 (1931-4)
Etwas lebhaft (Rather lively)
Sehr langsam (very slow)
Sehr rasch (Very fast)
Webern’s works, it has been said, lie in the limbo between the noise of life and the stillness of death. His complete output, in performances directed by Pierre Boulez, can be contained on three CDs, which seems scant space for one of the twentieth century’s acknowledged masters. But when we remember that his mastery lay in the art of unrivalled compression, and that each disc may include forty or fifty pieces, songs or movements of one sort or another, then all becomes clear. Webern’s Symphony, Op 21, says as much in its nine-minute span (if you listen to it closely enough) as does a great romantic symphony of the nineteenth century. The third of his Six Pieces for Orchestra, designed to be played at a “measured” pace, lasts all of fifty seconds.
Though the epigrammatic themes of Webern’s works consist very often of no more than a few notes, what he did with those notes could add up to a pocket music drama or a tiny dirge of profoundly pensive expressiveness. Yet his roots lay in the same Vienna as produced Beethoven’s Eroica and Schubert’s 'Great' C major. Webern himself, as a student, seemed to be following in the footsteps of his predecessors, as his early, rich-textured music, such as the vast Langsamer Satz (“Slow Movement”) for string quartet suggests. By the time he reached his Six Pieces for Orchestra, however, all the big romantic statements, the dramatic changes of mood, the sweetly blossoming high notes, the Wagnerian chromaticism, the Straussian lushness, the erotic tensions and relaxations had been stripped away.
Yet he continued in his later works to employ a large orchestra full of colourful potential, while exploiting what his teacher Arnold Schoenberg described as his ability to “write a novel in a single gesture, a joy in a breath.” The result, as Stravinsky remarked, was the essence of music - and it certainly left its stamp on Stravinsky’s later works. The Concerto, Op 24, is the soul of brevity. Heard in the context of this evening’s programme, it may sound evocative of a Mozart concerto, complete with piano and various Mozartian instruments (flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, violin, viola), pared to an irreducible minimum.
Through its process of distillation, the music - written for Schoenberg on his sixtieth birthday - has been called a supreme example of Webern’s strict application of disciplined procedures. It is a work of the tiniest dimensions, the ever-changing three-note motifs of the first movement reappearing in the central adagio, with a topping of flute tone, trumpet shafts and piano chords sounding like a coded version of the slow movement of Mozart’s K467 or one of his other Viennese masterpieces. In the offbeat finale, with its swinging syncopations and rasping trombone, Mozart remains visible through the telescope. The work, interrupted by writer’s block, took more than two years to complete.
© Conrad Wilson
