Schoenberg: Suite for piano - Gigue

Never judge a piece of music by its titles: people who imagine something primly neo-classical to emerge from these gigues and gavottes and wot-not are in for a nasty schock.
Born in Vienna in 1874, the composer and painter Arnold Schoenberg spent his early career in Berlin. Some of that city’s cultural iconoclasm and arch humour certainly found its way into the Piano Suite: it is one long, brilliantly calculated assault to classical sensibilities – never mind that its difficulty has dealt the killer blow to many a pianist’s self-confidence.
The Belgrade-born pianist Aleksandar Madžar knows that this is not a piece of music you can ever get the better of. "The writing is extremely polyphonic and ambitious, and the technical demands on the pianist are considerable. This is nothing, though, compared to the immensity of the purely musical demands – the performer is supposed to suggest intimacy, drama, exaltation, create something ‘in the style of a Brahmsian intermezzo’, be deeply lyrical – in other words, supply the usual affective ingredients of a Schoenberg masterpiece, all without a single major or minor chord!"

Tags

Music at Plush, suite, Aleksandar Madzar, Schoenberg, serialism, and gigue