Vienna
A New Era

Alain Altinoglu

Vienna, early twentieth century. Under pressure from industrialization, the rise of psychoanalysis and growing social tensions, familiar world views are losing their footing and the refined styles of the fin de siècle their lustre. In music, literature and the visual arts, the boundaries of expression are being radically pushed back. Composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern and Alexander von Zemlinsky each sought, in their own way, a new sound idiom, rooted in late Romanticism but unmistakably turned towards the future. During this concert, Alain Altinoglu will showcase three of their masterpieces, all written at this turning point in European cultural history.

Desire, anticipation, fulfilment, liberation, departure – Alexander von Zemlinsky’s masterful and all too rarely performed Lyric Symphony takes you through all the stages of tragic love. Based on the poetry of Nobel Prize winner Rabindranath Tagore, this key work of twentieth-century music ultimately paved the way for spiritual acceptance: ‘Wir werden einander in die Augen schauen / Und jeder seines Weges ziehn’ (We will look each other in the eye / And each go our own way).

In Verklärte Nacht, Arnold Schoenberg stages a poignant meeting in a moonlit forest. Full of despair, a young woman confesses to her lover that she is expecting another man’s child. He forgives her and promises to raise the child as his own. Through subtle motivic development and rich orchestration, Schoenberg closely follows all of the characters’ inner emotional conflicts, up until the final transfiguration.

‘To surrender completely to the listening experience. To experience sounds through the senses’: that is what Anton Webern demands of his listeners. This concert opens with his Opus 1, the Passacaglia, which he composed at the end of his studies. Intended to demonstrate his mastery of counterpoint, the work also heralds the bold artistic paths he would later take.