Haunting Viennese

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In his most concentrated works (e.g., Five Pieces for orchestra, Six Bagatelles for string quartet, Three Small Pieces for cello and piano), Webern pulverized melody, harmony and rhythm. Schoenberg said that these pieces packed the art of "a whole novel in a single sigh." The result is music that drones at times with shrill insect insistence, rises to jagged, shrieking climaxes, lapses in midphrase into sudden silences that form a weird counterpoint to sound. Most listeners will be more attracted to Webern's songs, based on such idyllic poems as Goethe's The Perfect Match ("A flowerbell blossomed early from the ground in lovely bloom").

This is no album to be listened to all at once, or to be judged on first hearing. But after a while there emerges from Webern's works a kind of rhythmic logic all his own. There are the same echoes of a distorted reality that characterize Kafka —the sound of church bells (or is it thunder?), snatches of bugles and drums (but what living army ever marched to such a beat?), or a sudden hop and skip, as of a fragmented polka (but no belle ever danced to such measures).

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