This is Alban Berg as you’ve never heard him before. The English conductor Sir Andrew Davis has spent lockdown time orchestrating two works that Berg never intended for orchestra. The piano sonata of 1907-08 was Berg’s first published work, written under the admonitory thumb of his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, who was in the throes of embracing atonality.
The Passacaglia of 1913 is another Berg stepping stone towards maturity. In Davis’s orchestration, the sonata score sounds like a missing suite from his second opera, Lulu, while the Passacaglia is steeped in its predecessor, Wozzeck.
If I’d heard it in a blind listening, I would probably have identified the music as Berg, though some passages could be mistaken for Franz Schreker, the arch-decadent opera composer of the day. No bad thing in any event, and the music is extremely listenable when played as persuasively as this by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with haunting solos by concertmaster Igor Yuzefovich. Like much of Schreker, if washes over and around you without gripping the ear. The Three orchestral Pieces of 1914-15 are played here in Berg’s original score, though they too are a bit Schrek-lich, if you’ll pardon the German pun.
The violin concerto is another matter. Written as a tribute to Alma Mahler’s teenaged daughter Manon, who died of polio, and imbued with the dual eroticism of Lulu and Berg’s extramarital love affair with Alma’s sister-in-law in Prague, the work was paid for by an American violinist, Louis Krasner, in exchange for exclusive playing rights.
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