Alban Berg - Violin Concerto op 36

I was thrilled beyond any description when I found this Youtube of a cleaned up recording of the second performance of the famous Berg Violin Concerto, played by the man who commissioned it, Louis Krasner and conducted by Berg's fellow student of Schoenberg and most perhaps careful interpreter,  the great composer Anton Webern conducting the BBC orchestra.

It's certainly not modern digital quality but the recording from old acetate recordings owned by Louis Krasner reveal levels of detail in both Krasner's playing and Webern's conducting that make them an essential document for anyone intending to perform the work or to have a deeper knowledge of the music.  I think it also should inform people about how Webern may have seen his own music. It certainly isn't the cool to chilly kind of interpretation that people associated with Webern back when I was in college.   I remember listening to the great pianist Alfred Brendel saying that he believed the reason people didn't like Schoenberg's music wasn't because it was cold and "mathematical," pointing out the monodrama Erwartung and, if I recall, the Three Pieces op. 11, he pointed out that it is some of the most intensely emotional music ever written.

The Berg Concerto was written over a number of years, to be dedicated to the memory of Manon Gropius, the daughter of  Alma Mahler and her second husband Walter Gropius (see picture on the Youtube posted below).   It was finished after the start of the heart disease which would kill Berg not long after he completed the piece, it is full of the experience of facing the loss of loved ones and our own eventual death.  By the time in the second and last movement that he quotes the J. S. Bach chorale, Es Ist Genug it is almost unbearably sad and disturbing music. I don't know much about Berg's ideas about the afterlife but Webern, a Catholic mystic, certainly believed in it.  But there isn't any way to talk about this piece in words that comes near to the point of it, you have to listen to the piece to begin to understand that and this recording, for all its shortcomings is the best way I've ever heard into it.  I've listened to it scores, maybe hundreds of times but this is like hearing it for the first time.  There are many other recordings of the piece on Youtube if you want to hear a cleaner recording, it is one of the most often performed and recorded violin concertos of the 20th century.  Krasner performed recorded it with many other conductors.

Here is a more hi-fi recording of it, which is among the best I know of.

Henryk Szeryng, violin
Symphonie-Orchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Rafael Kubelik, conductor

These recordings all sound better on a disc than they do on Youtube.  I'm not sure if the first one has been made available in a good transfer but if it is I'm ordering it as soon as I get this posted.

The Berg Concerto is the one piece that I've heard people who declare they hate "12-tone" or "atonal music" or "academic serialism" (the stupidest of all musical labels, used almost exclusively by idiots) make an exception for  It is a work of transcendent greatness.