Arnold Schoenberg’s Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra in B Flat
This retooling of a Handel work is meant to correct the original's defects
"I am somewhat sad," said composer Arnold Schoenberg,"that people talk so much of atonality, of 12-tone systems, of technical methods, when it comes to my music. All music, all human work has a skeleton, a circulatory and nervous system. I wish that my music should be considered as an honest and intelligent person who comes to us saying something he feels deeply and which is of significance to all of us." If, when hearing the maitre of the Second Viennese School—the man who put the bite in tonality, pushed it to its very breaking point, and then (depending on whom you ask) eradicated it altogether—wrote a concerto for string quartet and orchestra, you might well blanche at the thought, perhaps imagining an entire half a concert of gripping dissonance, Weldschmerz, and sheer agony. But fear not: oddly enough this work is in the key of B-flat major.
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