The Berlin Philharmonic has never been particularly associated with the music of Arnold Schoenberg, though both Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado recorded his Gurrelieder with the orchestra, and in the 1970s Herbert von Karajan included superlative versions of Pelleas und Melisande and the orchestral Variations in his Berlin box of recordings of the Second Viennese School. But to judge from this impressive collection of five works by Schoenberg, all recorded at concerts in the Berlin Philharmonie between 2019 and last year, Kirill Petrenko is already exploring the composer far more thoroughly than any of his predecessors.
Petrenko’s set does include some of Schoenberg’s best known works. There’s the string sextet Verklärte Nacht in its sumptuous string-orchestra expansion, and the Chamber Symphony No 1, thankfully not in the late orchestral version that blurs the acerbic textures and robs the instrumental writing of its muscularity, but in the original scoring for 15 solo instruments. And a superb account of the Violin Concerto, in which the soloist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, turns what can sometimes seem a rather four-square, dutifully conventional piece into something constantly surprising, and the Variations for Orchestra, with each event vividly, fiercely characterised.
