Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck was acutely attuned to the newest musical developments, and while his musical language was firmly post-Romantic, during the 1920s the innovations of Berg and Stravinsky enriched his expressive vocabulary. His music of this period sounds much more progressive than that of Richard Strauss, to whom he is sometimes compared, but he later rejected modernism and returned to a more conventional tonality. Penthesilea, written between 1923 and 1925, based on the myth of the savage Amazon queen, is a ...
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Swiss composer Othmar Schoeck was acutely attuned to the newest musical developments, and while his musical language was firmly post-Romantic, during the 1920s the innovations of Berg and Stravinsky enriched his expressive vocabulary. His music of this period sounds much more progressive than that of Richard Strauss, to whom he is sometimes compared, but he later rejected modernism and returned to a more conventional tonality. Penthesilea, written between 1923 and 1925, based on the myth of the savage Amazon queen, is a brutally violent and searingly dramatic score. Using a bizarre orchestra with a bass-heavy string section (with only four violins), augmented percussion and wind sections (with 10 clarinets), and two pianos, Schoeck creates a sound-world that's unlike quite anything else. The music is almost relentlessly ferocious; it's only alleviated by a love duet in the middle that the composer added later as a respite from the score's nervous energy. The opera receives a terrific performance in...
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