PhotoWhat’s most fascinating, and even moving, about the experimental works Arnold Schoenberg wrote in his mid-30s is how you hear a pioneering composer treading an uncertain path. Born in 1874, Schoenberg eventually concluded that the late Germanic Romanticism of his youth, with its hold on tonal (that is, major- and minor-key) harmony, had become an exhausted language. A little later that afternoon, the superb Brentano String Quartet played a typically adventurous program at the 92nd Street Y, culminating with a rare performance of Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. Mr. Botstein began by describing both “Erwartung” and the paintings of Munch (the subject of a major exhibition at the museum’s Met Breuer space) as works of Expressionism. For Schoenberg, the system of tonality was the equivalent of the Expressionists’ conventional reality.

Source: New York Times December 04, 2017 23:48 UTC