Landmark songs composed at a turning point of the Austro-German Lieder tradition, rarely recorded but suffused with passion and beauty.
Essentially self-taught, Schoenberg graduated from playing cello and piano as a teenager to writing his own music through the medium of song. The lyrical tendency in his music is under-appreciated because of the attention drawn to his harmonic innovations such as the twelve-tone system, but Schoenberg began composing, like so many of his predecessors, with the impulse to set poetry to melody and to capture transcendent states – love, longing and death – in music.
Accordingly any recorded survey of Schoenberg’s songs still has much to show us about his place at the culmination of a heritage stretching back to Beethoven and Schubert. The Hong Kong-baseed duo of Jasmine Law and Nancy Loo open this personal selection from his song output with the yearning impressionism of the Four Songs Op.2 (1899), setting poetry by Richard Dehmel whose ‘Transfigured Night’ was inspiring Schoenberg at the same time to compose an instrumental setting for string sextet, Verklärte Nacht.
From the spring of 1907, the ballad of Lady Jane Grey, Op.12 No.1, inhabits the same mystical world as the Second String Quartet in which Schoenberg first composed with a tone row and also set the poetry of the German symbolist Stefan George. A more thoroughgoing engagement with George’s work then inspired Schoenberg’s most substantial contribution to the literature of art-song with his Op.15 collection, The Book of the Hanging Gardens.
This collection, in the tradition of An die ferne Geliebte, sets a doomed love story in a sequence of 15 short songs. It shares an atonal language with Pierrot Lunaire and other, more superficially radical breaks with tradition, but The Book of the Hanging Gardens glistens and shimmers with a playful harmonic language which makes clear Schoenberg’s roots in the Romanticism of Brahms and Zemlinsky.
The soprano Jasmine Law has built a broad repertoire that includes operas, oratorios, art songs and contemporary music. She sang the lead role of Eliza in the European premiere production of Nico Muhly's opera Dark Sisters at the Trentino Music Festival in Italy in 2018. She was coached in these songs by the late conductor and Schoenberg scholar Paul Zukofsky, who also praised the ‘first-rate’ pianism of Nancy Loo.
Arnold Schoenberg (1874, Vienna, Austria—1951, Los Angeles, California, U.S.), was a Jewish-Austrian composer who created new methods of musical composition involving atonality, serialism and the 12-tone row. This revolutionary break with tonality was the essence of the Second Viennese School, established by Schoenberg and his contemporaries and pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern.
In his Lieder (Songs) the development of Schoenberg’s style may be clearly traced. In the early songs of Opus 2 and 12 the music is still influenced by the dense harmonic language of the Late Romantics. It is in his monumental Opus 15, Das Buch der hängenden Gärten (the Book of the Hanging Gardens), that Schoenberg’s personal, atonal and highly expressive language came into full bloom. The 15 songs are settings of poems by Stefan George, describing the failed love affair of two adolescent youths in a garden, ending with the woman's departure and the disintegration of the garden, possibly as a metaphor of the destruction of tonality and traditional forms.
Soprano Jasmine Law is based in Hong Kong, she specializes in contemporary music. She sang Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire with the Hong Kong New Music Ensemble under the baton of contemporary music champion Paul Zukofsky. Pianist Nancy Loo is one of Hong Kong’s most versatile artists, she performed with the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Singapore Symphony Orchestra and the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra.
