Alban Berg’s two best known orchestral works naturally provide the headlines, but it is the pieces that begin this disc that mark it out from most of its competitors. Last year the conductor Andrew Davis made orchestral versions of two early scores by Berg – his Piano Sonata Op 1, completed by 1909, while he was studying with Schoenberg, and the unfinished Passacaglia on a 12-note theme, which is the only substantial surviving fragment (four minutes long) of what was possibly going to be a symphony, conceived just before the outbreak of the first world war. Both pieces have been orchestrated and even recorded before but, as he writes in a sleeve note, Davis felt that those versions had not really evoked the Viennese sound world of Mahler, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Schreker that Berg inhabited at that time.
Certainly his versions vividly connect this music not only to the composers who were his models, but to Berg’s own later scores, especially to the Three Orchestral Pieces, which were conceived at about the same time as the Passacaglia. Presented in this way, the sonata particularly sounds more forward-looking, more Bergian, than it often does on the piano, while the Passacaglia clearly shows its links to the work in the same form that Berg’s colleague and fellow Schoenberg pupil Anton Webern had designated as his Op 1.
Underlining the connections, Davis follows those pieces with a steadily intensifying account of the Three Orchestral Pieces, rightly fixing its centre of gravity in the catastrophic final pages of the terrifying Marsch. Alongside that, the performance of the Violin Concerto seems rather gentle and affectionate, with many of the score’s sharper corners smoothed off. The warm-toned soloist is James Ehnes, who at times might be just a little too affectionate for some tastes, especially in the final set of variations; overall, though, this is a wonderfully idiomatic and accomplished Berg collection, with some outstanding playing from the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
This week’s other pick
For their latest Harmonia Mundi release, François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles follow their recording three years ago of an early version of Mahler’s First Symphony with what seems to be the first ever recording on period instruments of the Fourth Symphony.
With Sabine Devieilhe as the soprano presenting the child’s view of heaven in the last movement, Roth’s strait-laced performance suits the symphony’s pared down textures and classical proportions well, though one suspects that later instalments of his Mahler series, if it continues, will be more revealing.
