Arnold Schoenberg's Violin Concerto, Op. 36, of 1936, can't be called a listener-friendly work. It's a spiky, edgy 12-tone piece that poses considerable difficulty for the soloist, and it has never found frequent performances despite its composer's celebrity. Violinist Isabelle Faust, with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Harding, does well to take it on its own terms, letting the intrinsic knottiness of the lines emerge and cultivating a dispassionate tone. This results in a strong performance, for beyond ...
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Arnold Schoenberg's Violin Concerto, Op. 36, of 1936, can't be called a listener-friendly work. It's a spiky, edgy 12-tone piece that poses considerable difficulty for the soloist, and it has never found frequent performances despite its composer's celebrity. Violinist Isabelle Faust, with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Harding, does well to take it on its own terms, letting the intrinsic knottiness of the lines emerge and cultivating a dispassionate tone. This results in a strong performance, for beyond the concerto's basic tone, its interest lies in how Schoenberg tries to reconcile the 12-tone system with the very classical form of the concerto. Despite the tone row, parts of the work sound almost tonal, and Faust's clean, precise performance lets this emerge. She's even better in the early sextet Verklärte Nacht, Op. 4, which has had murkier, more decadent performances but settles down, in this performance with Faust as the lead violinist, at the end into the transcendence...
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