27 (1936) that we hear a more typically sophisticated serial technique from Webern. Written in 1924, Webern's Kinderstück is his earliest complete piece using 12-note serialism, but it is with his Variations, Op. Webern's Satz (1906) was written not long after he had begun to take lessons with Schoenberg, but the piece shows clearly how Webern's music grew out of the 19th century.

Harmonically, the sonata begins and ends in B minor, but includes a range of non-tonal harmonies. We hear on this album Berg's Op.1 Sonata, in which there is an intricate network of motivic relations, rhythmic flexibility and metrical ambiguity, the music unfolding with the sort of fluidity and connectedness which are hallmarks of Brahms' style. And on the other hand she has always perceived Brahms' music as a magic prism, in which an entire musical past (encompassing Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann?) merges together, before breaking off into rivulets that will give birth to 20th-century music. This provides the essence of this album: traversing time in two directions, looking at Brahms from the future of the modern Viennese, and vice versa, looking at the Second Viennese School from the past of Brahmsian romanticism.įor Pina Napolitano there are romantic echoes in the works of the Second Viennese School an enormous expressive force distilled and compressed, all the way up to Webern's rarefied language where even the silences are charged with music and significance. This seems to be what Schoenberg invites us to do in his essay, 'Brahms the Progressive', in which Brahms, often considered a musical 'conservative', becomes instead the father of modernism.

$ įor acclaimed pianist Pina Napolitano, there is no better way of looking at art and history than through the lens of inverted time, from the present to the past.

Brahms the progressive pdf