Recording of the Week, Leonskaja celebrates the Second Viennese School

Mention of the Second Viennese School prompts some to run for the hills. Whether this describes you or you have established a love for the works of Berg, Schoenberg and Webern, I urge you to lend both ears to this new album by pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja. It may be your gateway into this music.

Berg’s early works didn’t find voice outside Vienna until after he signed with Universal Edition in 1923, and it was the 1925 premiere of his opera Wozzeck which truly established him. The piano sonata was written in 1908-9, when the composer was very much under Schoenberg’s tuition.

The influence of Berg’s preoccupation with song is apparent from the opening notes, and Leonskaja expresses a sense of shape that is crucial to the whole piece, allied to superb textural clarity. Leading edges of new phrases are suitably defined to elucidate the contrapuntal writing, and Leonskaja illuminates the relationships between restatements and retrograde inversions of the opening theme in such a way that there is no risk of becoming lost whilst wondering at the chromatic colours of Berg’s sound world. This piece has been served well, including by Igor Levit and Evgeny Kissin, but Leonskaja’s new recording is a jewel. Amongst the most essential companion listening is the late Andrew Davis’ superb orchestral transcription, paired with James Ehnes’s revelatory reading of the violin concerto.

The programme is nicely ordered, the Berg being the most accessible work and establishing a context in which the Webern and Schoenberg works become more approachable than you might expect. The key to unlocking the beauty of this repertoire is in finding coherency despite the seemingly fragmented writing, especially in the Webern Variations, and Leonskaja achieves this with poise.

Schoenberg's 3 Pieces Op.11 have strong stylistic and thematic similarities to the Berg sonata, unashamedly betraying the fact that they were written around the same time. This music seamlessly eases from the extreme chromaticism deployed in the later works of Mahler, Wagner and Richard Strauss, to the atonalism which would become the defining language of Schoenberg and his students. After the Webern, these pieces provide another anchor point without shying away from Schoenberg’s passion for removing the constraints he observed in tonality. Leonskaja’s recorded legacy amply demonstrates that she shares the grounding that Schoenberg and his disciples both embraced and rejected, and throughout this album she illuminates the relationship between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’.

The Kleine Klavierstücke, Op.19 are from the same transitional period, but their key characteristic is brevity. This is Schoenberg expressing larger ideas with economy, offering a focused intensity that Webern adopted, including in the Variations. Leonskaja makes these pieces say so much more than their length suggests, and she fully inhabits Schoenberg’s expressionist aesthetic.

This persuasive recital ends with Schoenberg’s Suite, Op.25, written between 1921 and 1923. This work marks a complete transition to 12-tone serialism, and yet the Baroque names of the movements point clearly to the fact that Schoenberg had not lost sight of what came before him. This acknowledgement of the past brings the music more within grasp than you might expect, and as throughout this album, the coherency, commitment and expressiveness of Leonskaja’s playing is utterly engaging.

Whether seeing this release as Recording of the Week excited you or made you want to take flight, its persuasiveness and the sheer musicality of Leonskaja’s playing makes it an essential listen. Schoenberg and his two most gifted pupils challenged established compositional techniques whilst also embracing some elements of the past, and Leonskaja proves to be the ideal guide. The booklet notes are excellent, and Warner’s engineers have captured these important interpretations beautifully.