Pierre Boulez conducts Berg & Mozart
Mitsuko Uchida (piano) & Christian Tetzlaff (violin)
Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez
The Berg is superbly played… Christian Tetzlaff plays the solo violin part with breathtaking technical mastery…
Pierre Boulez conducts Berg & Mozart
Mitsuko Uchida (piano) & Christian Tetzlaff (violin)
Ensemble Intercontemporain, Pierre Boulez
Purchase product
The Berg is superbly played… Christian Tetzlaff plays the solo violin part with breathtaking technical mastery…
About
Vienna's eighteenth- and twentieth-century musical worlds meet: Pierre Boulez leads one of the world's finest pianists in Berg's Kammerkonzert and conducts Mozart's exquisite chamber work for wind, the Gran Partita.
"Glowing with a mastery and conviction known to very few pianists, her performances brim over with zest, sheer style and assurance" Gramophone
"Boulez brings clarity to every sound strand, colour and dynamic…you hear nuances that many performances sweep under the carpet" The Times
Two great intellectual and musical minds meet for a new collaboration as the First Viennese School meets the Second. The concept is the pairing of two pieces which are in fact related more closely than one might at first think. Twelve-tone twentieth-century composition meets and draws inspiration from eighteenth-century classical form; Berg, like Mozart in the Gran Partita, used 13 wind instruments for his chamber work, and also looked to the musical structures used by Mozart and his contemporaries.
Uchida and Boulez's previous collaboration, of piano works by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, won both a Gramophone Award, and an Edison award in the Netherlands.
Contents and tracklist
- Ensemble Intercontemporain
- Pierre Boulez
- Recorded: 2008-03-21
- Recording Venue: IRCAM Studio, Paris
- Mitsuko Uchida (piano), Christian Tetzlaff (violin)
- Ensemble Intercontemporain
- Pierre Boulez
- Recorded: 2008-03-21
- Recording Venue: IRCAM Studio, Paris
Spotlight on this release
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Alban Berg
24th Apr 2014
James sifts through the music of Alban Berg and offers his recommended recordings.
Awards and reviews
December 2008
The Berg is superbly played… Christian Tetzlaff plays the solo violin part with breathtaking technical mastery…
December 2008
…there's a sense of fun, of genial affection for the music. Whether in the fluid lines of the tender Adagio or the yearning Andante, or in the bustling, concise finale, where everything - in the true spirit of opera buffa - seems to come right, Boulez makes plain his relish for the work [Mozart Gran Partita]. Berg's Chamber Concerto was also written for an auspicious event - the 50th birthday of his friend and mentor Arnold Schoenberg. ...what makes Mitsuko Uchida and Christian Tetzlaff outstanding is their feeling for the piece's inherent theatricality. ...Urchida brings to the opening variation set a breathtaking rhapsody... the Rondo ritmico, begins with a swirling cadenza. The freedom of the two players here is extraordinary, undoubtedly helped by the fact that they toured the work before taking it into the studio.
24th April 2014
Boulez brings his customary clarity to every bar of this music, and Uchida finds poise and a depth of expression that I've not heard in any other recording.
24th October 2008
[In the Mozart] the EIC's phrasing is a model of clarity and good taste. It's the performance of the Berg, though, that makes this such an important issue; both soloists...are perfectly attuned to Boulez's approach...The authority and logic of the performance are compelling, and this is easily the best version of this intractable work to appear on CD.
New York Times 25th November 2015
Boulez’s Berg is a known quality...But his Mozart? Ravishingly demure. The conductor’s talent for lightness and his immaculate balancing makes the Ensemble Intercontemporain sound less like a chamber ensemble than a single instrument.
