Anton Webern

And, you know, they would...

Yeah, Schoenberg, like, you would have a concert and it'd be Bach, like Mozart, Bach, Webern-

Yeah

... and then Schubert.

When you perform, because theory, again, what we need to focus more is how music works.

For example, you know, Webern has this very sparse music.

And then if you understand the notes and then the tempo and then the direction and interval and all these things shape music.

the phrase and the form

Do you remember that? It was a long time ago.

But I had a conversation with him because there was some Webern that was on this school's concert.

And he was like saying, wow, that was brave doing that.

But actually, it was a short piece that had some interesting musical sounds.

We'll also turn to Russia as violinist Vadim Glusman takes on Shostakovich's alternately biting and poignant First Violin Concerto.

All of that, plus the summertime sounds of Anton Webern, are ahead on this week's CSO program.

I'm Lisa Simeoni.

Welcome to this Chicago Symphony Orchestra broadcast on the radio and online.

David Avcom led the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in a June 2023 performance.

Still to come, two portraits of Austria.

We'll hear Ravel's depiction of a Viennese waltz and Webern's postcard from the Austrian countryside.

Stay with us.

I thought there were just kind of these isolated sound events and And it surprised me that somebody was still writing that sort of stuff in 1987.

To me, it's associated more with the 50s or 60s, maybe with Morton Feldman, but also with somebody like Webern or some of his followers who maybe would have been more sparse.

Certainly not somebody like Boulez who likes to be more dense.

But the other thing was that it was really low.

But that, and that is post-war serialism, what we call integral serialism.

And the name Webern comes to mind.

Was he a user of this, or was he...

Webern was the inspiration for integral serialism.

Webern was a student of Schoenberg.

Yeah,

yeah.

But that extreme level of organization was actually sort of the inspirational model that the people who did integral serialism, Bulez, Shostakovich, not Shostakovich, Stockhausen, sorry.

But sometimes I need help.

I mean, I listened to Webern last night, the modernist German composer who was shot dead when he was quite young.

I didn't enjoy it in the way I can enjoy music.

Rachmaninoff or Beethoven or Schubert in particular.

You can...

Basically, as far as I understand it, they were... like webern's brother was like involved in yeah black market um as they say here like this story is basically exactly how it happened and then uh anton stepped outside and was promptly shot uh by the an over eager police raid

where was he from

uh i couldn't find where he was from in north carolina but

They're followed by a strikingly dissonant movement of a more rhapsodic character.

About a year after the premiere of Sinfonietta in Boston under Sloninski in early 1931, Webern conducted, and all these great names associated with this very independent stylistic approach to composing is quite remarkable.

The Sinfonietta is in three movements.

They are not particularly distinguishable per se, and are not separated in any particular way.

Oliver Danyanyi led the Polish State Philharmonic in the Carnival's Ambassador Waltz by Johann Strauss Jr.

Next up, a set of six German dances by Franz Schubert, orchestrated here by Webern.

We'll hear the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra with conductor Pierre Boulez.

© transcript Emily Beynon © transcript Emily Beynon ¦ ¦ ¶¶ ¦ ¦ ¦ ¦ Thank you.