eMusic Review 0
Alban Berg was the most outwardly impassioned member of Vienna’s modernist triumvirate. His teacher, Arnold Schönberg, developed the 12-tone technique that Berg adopted and that Anton Webern used to distill terse whispers of music — pieces that sometimes lasted no longer than 30 seconds. Berg had song and opera coursing through his veins, though. For 50 years, the world knew the 1925-6 Lyric Suite as a six-movement string quartet, pulsing with high-minded romance and bruised, tender harmonies. Then, in 1977, the composer and Berg scholar George Perle not only discovered that the piece commemorated an adulterous love affair with one Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, but unearthed the last movement’s hidden vein of vocal melody, setting a poem by Baudelaire (“Have pity, my one love and sole delight!”). This recording is the fruit of that research: Dawn Upshaw sings the soprano part that Perle reconstructed and the Kronos quartet plays as if they understand Berg’s struggle simultaneously to conceal and express the passion that infused his days.
