Has there ever been a more heartwarming venture than the Society for Private Musical Performances set up by Arnold Schoenberg in 1918?
I doubt it. In just three years, this group gave more than 100 concerts, airing music that was not easy to hear in Vienna, featuring composers ranging from
Bartok and Ravel to Debussy and Webern.
When scores were beyond the resources of his chamber-sized forces, Schoenberg simply scaled the work down, most drastically when the gargantuan score of Mahler's Song of the Earth was allotted to just 17 musicians.
A new Naxos CD offers this mighty sequence of lieder, along with four selections from the same composer's Songs of a Wayfarer, with JoAnn Falletta conducting the Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players and Attacca Quartet.
Crisply recorded, Mahler's great Earth Song may startle and delight many, with its potent woodwind colourings and a striking intimacy that only falls short in the final 31-minute Farewell.
