CD Review (The Straits Times, August 2018)

FROM VIENNA

London Conchord Ensemble

Champs Hill Records 115 (2 CDs) / *****

This double-disc album is an illuminating two-and-half-hour musical tour of Vienna from the classical era of Mozart to the 20^th century iconoclasm of Schoenberg. Seen through the lenses of woodwinds, piano and strings, clarinettist Maximiliano Martin and pianist Julian Milford are ever-present in all seven works performed.

The first disc opens with Mozart's “Kegelstatt” Clarinet Trio K.498, delightfully scored for clarinet, viola and piano. Its congeniality and warmth continues into the famous pair of Piano Quintets (piano with winds, namely clarinet, oboe, bassoon and French horn) by Mozart and Beethoven, perfect partners heard alongside each other. 

The Second Viennese School occupies the second disc. But first listen to the Trio in D minor for clarinet, cello and piano by Alexander Zemlinsky, better known as teacher and brother-in-law of Arnold Schoenberg. Its late Romantic and Brahms-influenced idiom receives a shock to the system when followed by Schoenberg's compact Chamber Symphony No.1 (transcribed by his student Anton Webern) which openly flirts with atonalism.

The ground-breaking 12-tone idiom becomes established with the Adagio from Alban Berg's Chamber Symphony, but the music has vestiges of lushness and sentimentality. To close, Johann Strauss the Younger's Emperor Waltz, arranged for septet by Schoenberg, makes for a particularly delicious encore.