Vienna: From Mozart To Schoenberg – London Sinfonietta & David Atherton

Vienna, old and new, meet on this journey from Mozart to Schoenberg and then on to Berg, Weill, Gerhard and Ligeti with David Atherton and the London Sinfonietta. Central to this anthology is the pioneering set of music by Schoenberg recorded in 1973–74 critically acclaimed for its ‘big line and attention to detail (Stereo Review) and for the “mellow but well-detailed recording’ (Gramophone).

The London Sinfonietta is renowned across the world as one of the most adventurous groups commissioning and performing new music. From its inception, however, the Sinfonietta played the classics alongside new and avant-garde pieces, and this new Eloquence set traces the engagement of the group with the Viennese tradition.

At the centre of the set is the 5-LP survey of Schoenberg’s chamber music – from the early and Wagnerian Verklärte Nacht to the late Phantasy for violin and piano – which the Sinfonietta recorded in 1973-4 to mark the centenary of the composer’s birth. The recordings were bedded in by extensive performing experience, in a comprehensive concert series celebrating the music of Schoenberg and his Catalan student, Roberto Gerhard.

The Sinfonietta’s co-founder David Atherton had come to know Gerhard at Cambridge, and so these recordings bear the stamp of authority, as well as thorough preparation. In a new interview for the set with note-writer Peter Quantrill, Atherton explains the genesis of the Sinfonietta as formed around the unique instrumentation of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony. He and his colleagues shook up the London concert scene in the 1970s with their energy and commitment to modernist classics and living composers.

However, the Sinfonietta brought the same incisive musicianship to Mozart’s wind serenades and Schubert’s sacred music, as these Argo recordings testify. A further rarity is the album of clarinet concertos by Louis Spohr, with the ensemble’s long-standing clarinettist, Antony Pay, as soloist. Recorded after a complete Stravinsky concert series, their version of Agon has long been recognised as a definitive account. The Gerhard album preserves all three of the composer’s late and exquisite ‘Zodiac’ pieces, Gemini, Libra and Leo, the last two named after the zodiacal signs of Gerhard and his wife.

The set also includes the 3-LP Weill set that Atherton and the Sinfonietta recorded for Deutsche Grammophon in 1975, and concludes with the Ligeti album recorded that same year by the ensemble for Decca’s 20^th-century HEAD series with soloists Aurèle Nicolet (flute) and Heinz Holliger (oboe).

The set makes a significant contribution to the Schoenberg 150th anniversary year, as well as telling a compelling story of one of the UK’s most innovative performing ensembles.