The Berlin Philharmonic has never been particularly associated with the music of Arnold Schoenberg, though both Simon Rattle and Claudio Abbado recorded his Gurrelieder with the orchestra, and in the 1970s Herbert von Karajan included superlative versions of Pelleas und Melisande and the orchestral Variations in his Berlin box of recordings of the Second Viennese School. But to judge from this impressive collection of five works by Schoenberg, all recorded at concerts in the Berlin Philharmonie between 2019 and last year, Kirill Petrenko is already exploring the composer far more thoroughly than any of his predecessors.
Petrenko’s set does include some of Schoenberg’s best known works. There’s the string sextet Verklärte Nacht in its sumptuous string-orchestra expansion, and the Chamber Symphony No 1, thankfully not in the late orchestral version that blurs the acerbic textures and robs the instrumental writing of its muscularity, but in the original scoring for 15 solo instruments. And a superb account of the Violin Concerto, in which the soloist, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, turns what can sometimes seem a rather four-square, dutifully conventional piece into something constantly surprising, and the Variations for Orchestra, with each event vividly, fiercely characterised.
But there are already fine versions of all these works in the CD catalogue; it’s the recording of Die Jakobsleiter (Jacob’s Ladder), the first new version of the oratorio fragment in more than 20 years, that makes this release so compelling. Composed between 1915 and 1925, it was originally intended as the first half of a much larger work exploring spiritual transcendence in an earthly existence. But the project obsessed Schoenberg for much of his life, like his other great biblical epic, the opera Moses und Aron, he failed to complete the task, and it was left to one of his pupils, Winfried Zillig, to create a performing score out of what he had composed.
But as Petrenko’s magnificent performance shows, the score contains some of Schoenberg’s most powerful and impressive music, composed at a time when he was moving away from free atonality towards his first 12-note scores, and often more dramatic and theatrical than anything in Moses und Aron. It helps that Petrenko has a first-rate octet of soloists, led by the baritone Wolfgang Koch as Gabriel, but the sense he believes in the quality of every bar is inescapable.