CD + Blu-Ray:
Kirill Petrenko conducts Arnold Schoenberg

The Berliner Philharmoniker demonstrate that in Schoenberg’s music, “heart and brain” – as the composer titled an essay – are in balance.

Provocation! Anarchy! Scandal! All too often we encounter Arnold Schoenberg in writings as a radical innovator who sacrificed late Romantic tonality for his highly complex system of “composition with twelve tones related only to each other”. In this edition, the Berliner Philharmoniker and Kirill Petrenko demonstrate that in Schoenberg’s music even the twelve-tone technique is entirely at the service of expression.

The edition presents five central works that illustrate all of Schoenberg’s stylistic periods: Agitated passion characterises the lovers’ dialogue in Verklärte Nacht, sparkling humour the free-tonal Chamber Symphony. In the Variations, op. 31, each variation has its own individual character. The Violin Concerto (soloist: Patricia Kopatchinskaja), written in exile in America, reflects the composer’s uncertainty in the face of a foreign culture, material shortages, and a world once again on the brink of war. Die Jakobsleiter depicts the confrontation between a doubter and his God. Its twelve-tone nature becomes secondary to the poignant, almost existential experience that Schoenberg achieves through the precise design of spatial sound, among other things: the positioning of the main and remote ensembles that he demanded strikingly anticipates what can only be reproduced in our recordings today using Immersive Audio (Dolby Atmos).

In addition to the recordings on 3 CDs and a Blu-ray, the box set designed by Peter Halley contains a book with in-depth essays.