Alban Berg's Chamber Concerto (1923-1925) followed on the heels of the composer's greatly successful opera Wozzeck (1917-1922). Dedicated to Berg's teacher, mentor, and friend Arnold Schoenberg, the Chamber Concerto is a transitional work, marking the near-end of the composer's freely atonal period and approaching Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. The concerto, in fact, actually features a number of 12-note rows, though they are not yet used in a thoroughly systematic fashion. In the year following the concerto's completion, Berg finished the well-known Lyric Suite (1925-1926), his first extended work in the twelve-tone idiom. The Chamber Concerto is remarkable for the thoroughness of its organization; that is, it was composed with rigorous attention to minute details, and its structure is derived from a series of complex mathematical relationships. This is evident, for example, in the number of measures in each of the work's three movements. The first movement consists of variations that appear in alternating sets of 30 and 60 measures, totalling 240 measures; the second movement is exactly 240 measures long; and the number of measures in the final movement is equal to the sum of the measures in the first two (480). The work is both motivically and thematically highly integrated, with material from the first two movements returning in the final movement. The concerto is thus symmetrical and balanced in a manner associated less often with Berg than with Anton Webern, Berg's fellow Schoenberg disciple. The concerto has been described as a manifestation of Berg's early "constructivist" tendencies and is notable for the manner in which Berg combines atonal and twelve-tone music in the same work with ease.

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2.Adagio

The post-Wozzeck years found Alban Berg in a state of constant experimentation—perhaps not frantic, but certainly urgent. He had finished an opera that many felt and feel to be a masterpiece (there have always been some who believe Wozzeck's fame to be a little out of proportion with its achievement), and it was time to move on to new ground. The twelve-tone system of composition was emerging from Arnold Schoenberg's work during the early 1920s, and as a friend and former Schoenberg pupil, Berg could hardly resist dipping his toes into the same waters. Step by step he tried to figure out what it was about serialism that compelled Schoenberg and Webern so. The Chamber Concerto of 1923 - 1925 was one of the first steps. It is not a true twelve-tone piece, but there are many, many serial gestures and chromatically saturated passages like those found in Berg's later twelve-tone works.

The Chamber Concerto is a long work (a performance lasts between a half hour and three-quarters of an hour) scored for piano and violin and a baker's dozen ensemble of 13 wind instruments. It was and is not easy to get on concert programs, and perhaps because of this, Berg made an arrangement of its sizeable Adagio movement for the much more manageable combination of violin, clarinet, and piano.

The arrangement is not an especially successful one. The Adagio in its original version opens with long-drawn melody, slow and timeless-sounding, for violin, played to a background of wind chords and tremolos. This accompaniment is given entirely to the piano, which can neither sustain the cloud-like chords like a group of wind instruments nor make the tremolos shimmer as orchestral instruments can. Inevitably, it sounds plunky and even a little comic.

As the Adagio moves along and the music heats up the arrangement fares better—tense, dense, active music hides the incongruity of music and ensemble. And things do heat up: over the course of about 13 minutes, there is almost as much hair-raising drama as slow "traditional" Adagio music.

The Adagio arrangement was never published during Berg's lifetime; only in the 1950s did Universal Edition issue it.

© Blair Johnston, Rovi