BBC Music Magazine
December 2022
Orchestral Choice

Presto Recordings of the Year
Finalist 2022

James Ehnes (violin)

BBC Symphony Orchestra, Sir Andrew Davis

Berg: Piano Sonata, Op. 1
Berg: Passacaglia
Berg: Drei Orchesterstücke, Op. 6
Berg: Violin Concerto 'To the Memory of an Angel' (1935)

Born in 1885, Alban Berg was one of the most significant composers of the Second Viennese School, whose output proved tremendously influential in the development of music in the twentieth century. He was a student of Schoenberg, who found that his juvenile compositions were almost exclusively written for voice; his natural ability to write lyrical melodic lines (even in later life while following the restrictions of twelve-tone serialism) probably remained the most outstanding quality of his style. His Op. 1 Piano Sonata was the fulfilment of a task set by Schoenberg to write non-vocal music. The Passacaglia, written between the sonata and World War I was only completed in short-score, and may have been intended to form part of a larger work. Both pieces are recorded here in skilful orchestrations by Sir Andrew Davis. The Three Orchestral Pieces were composed alongside his first great masterpiece, Wozzeck, and could be seen as a tribute to his musical hero, Mahler. The Violin Concerto, from 1935, was commissioned by the American violinist Louis Krasner, but was inspired by the premature death (from polio) of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Alma Mahler and the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, hence the subtitle ‘to the memory of an angel’. It proved to be one of the composer’s final works as Berg died later that year as the result of an abscess from an insect sting.

"Ehnes gives a hauntingly elegiac account of Berg’s Violin Concerto...[He] makes it sound like a requiem not only for Manon Gropius, but also for Berg himself...His mellow tone is ideally captured on the recording, as is his readiness to play the role of accompanist when the main melodic line lies in the orchestra." - BBC Music Magazine, December 2022.