Camerata San Antonio
The Schoenberg piece that people like
April 14, 2010Camerata San Antonio fielded an excellent string sextet on April 11 to essay major works by two closely linked composers. The concert, in Travis Park United Methodist Church, opened with Arnold Schoenberg’s “Transfigured Night” and closed with Johannes Brahms’s String Sextet in G, Op. 36.
The players were violinists Ertan Torgul and Kimberly Torgul, violists Emily Freudigman and Lauren Magnus, and cellists Kenneth Freudigman and David Mollenauer.
“Transfigured Night” has an important but double-edged place in music history. Composed in 1899 and first performed three years later in Vienna, it was considered daringly advanced for its time because it stretched key-centered tonal harmony (it’s nominally in D Minor) nearly to the breaking point. Later, Schoenberg would abandon tonality altogether in some of his music, and eventually he developed his “method of composing with 12 tones which are related only with one another.” “Transfigured Night,” once the height of avant-garde experimentation, now seemed conservative and found genuine popularity. It came to be regarded approvingly as an example of Schoenberg’s accessible, melodic, beautiful, ripe-Romantic early style, from the years before he started writing all that really awful modern stuff.
The problem with that Jekyll-and-Hyde myth is that it assumes music is mostly about the relationship of pitches -- about chords that are either consonant or dissonant and melodies that either do or do not land properly at the tonic, to put it very simplistically. Music is at least as much about time -- about rhythm, tempo, counterpoint, polyphony, form, regularity and surprise, symmetry and asymmetry. And “Transfigured Night” is at least as interesting for the roiling complexity of its counterpoint as for its advances in harmony.
Even in so fine a performance as that by Camerata, “Transfigured Night” can sound overstuffed and turbid when the textures get very complex. That is rarely the case with Schoenberg’s 12-tone music, which remains lithe, zesty and transparent through all rhythmic and contrapuntal adventures. It’s as though tonality, even as Schoenberg distended it, weighed his music down and boxed it in, whereas the 12-tone method allowed it to dance free, the lines asserting their independent character but not interfering with each other.
On that interpretation, the best way to perform “Transfigured Night” might be to minimize the stylistic distance between it and the later 12-tone works by understating its dreamy atmospherics and Romantic sentimentality, and aiming wherever possible for fleet tempos and incisive rhythms, to hold everything together while crisply delineating the voices. That was Camerata’s approach, for the most part, though big dynamics and plenty of emotional intensity also maintained contact with the Expressionist aesthetic.
Music from a later period in Brahms’s career might have better illuminated Schoenberg’s debt to him, but the Sextet in G, dating from the early 1860s, is certainly an agreeable and very beautiful work. The performance was robust, if slightly wanting in refinement.
Mike
Greenberg
