This is a two-disc collection of music, either recorded on France's Naïve label or acquired by that label, that arose in Vienna during the years on either side of 1900. It might be argued that the music of the Viennese fin de siècle was all about extremes -- of length, of concision, of orchestration -- and that the best way to appreciate the musical culture of Vienna in 1900 would be to sit down and listen to a Mahler symphony from beginning to end. Still, for a program of short excerpts devoted to music that did not ...
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This is a two-disc collection of music, either recorded on France's Naïve label or acquired by that label, that arose in Vienna during the years on either side of 1900. It might be argued that the music of the Viennese fin de siècle was all about extremes -- of length, of concision, of orchestration -- and that the best way to appreciate the musical culture of Vienna in 1900 would be to sit down and listen to a Mahler symphony from beginning to end. Still, for a program of short excerpts devoted to music that did not think in those terms, this one works remarkably well. It draws key connections that are usually ignored, and the biggest one is between Brahms on the one hand and the Second Viennese School on the other. The casual concertgoer is likely to think of Brahms as the conservative and Schoenberg as the radical, but Schoenberg himself did not draw that distinction. The combination of emotional intensity and concision in Brahms' later works was determinative for the styles of Schoenberg,...
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