Joseph Swenson on Berg's Chamber Concerto: 'It's fascinating, but nobody wants to hear it'

“It’s one of the most fascinating pieces of music ever written, and nobody wants to hear it.” The piece Joseph Swensen is enthusing about – passionately and movingly – is Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto, completed almost a century ago in 1925. Swensen conducts the Concerto, alongside two short movements by Mahler, with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra later this month. And it’s a pairing of composers that fascinates him. “I can’t quite figure out myself how this charming, wistful, optimistic music that Mahler wrote can, within a quarter of a century, become Berg’s Chamber Concerto.”

He’s giving the piece quite a build-up. And he’s not finished yet. “Berg wrote the piece between the two world wars, and he’s describing the madness of violent death. In my opinion, that’s what this piece is about – the madness that makes possible violent death on an unimaginable scale.”

That’s quite a claim. But it’s one borne out by the music itself. Berg’s Chamber Concerto is indeed a huge, extreme piece of music. It brings together the unlikely combination of violin and piano soloists (Kolja Blacher and Roman Rabinovich at the SCO’s performances) plus an orchestra of just wind and brass, and it makes enormous demands on players and listeners alike. Why is it that nobody wants to hear it? (Though hopefully there will be enough interest to fill socially distanced concert halls.)

High on the list of reasons must be reputation. Berg, along with his co-student Anton Webern and their teacher Arnold Schoenberg, together formed what’s termed the Second Viennese School, notorious for its (supposedly) demanding, arid music written using impenetrable systems. But it’s a reputation that Swensen wants to challenge. “I have a problem with labels like that. They do a great injustice to the works of those composers, because people tend to lump them all together, when there’s so much variety. But then again, Berg lumped them together too: he spells out the names of himself, Schoenberg and Webern in the Chamber Concerto’s music, so you could say they get what they deserve.”

Indeed, Berg hides all manner of codes and symbols in the Chamber Concerto’s construction, not only embedding the three composers’ names in its fabric but also setting time spinning backwards with musical palindromes, even divulging gossip of scandalous affairs and suicides. For Swensen, however, what’s important is the sheer visceral impact of the music. “I don’t care about the technical aspects: if you tell me about palindromes, it makes me not want to hear the damn thing. For me, it’s a story, and a scary story, about madness.”

And it’s a story he sees as more relevant than ever today. “How many stories from the 19th century do we read – by Edgar Allan Poe or Robert Louis Stevenson, for example – that are written at the highest literary level about madness? Our present-day equivalents are slasher movies. They’re meant to scare the living daylights out of us and keep us up at night. But people want to experience that. I want to hear Berg’s Chamber Concerto for the same reason.”

For Swensen, dealing with such primal emotions and such darkness isn’t just legitimate: it’s a crucial element of human culture. “We have a history of wanting things to sound beautiful even if they’re painful – just think about all that music about being in love and missing your lover. But this music is beautiful in its own way: it’s the only piece I know that reaches that level of horror in such a beautiful way.”

How does it feel to perform such a powerful piece, to be stuck in the middle of Berg’s musical maelstrom? “The most important thing is that the audience feels I’m telling the truth. If I’m emoting and re-enacting horrific events, it becomes theatre. It’s up to us as performers to present this music at witnesses.” Music is too important, after all, to be just about pretty tunes and soothing harmonies. Why shouldn’t it shock and provoke, challenge and inspire? Berg’s Chamber Concerto certainly does all of those, and it has a passionate advocate in Swensen.

SCO: Berg and Mahler, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, 25 November and City Halls, Glasgow, 26 November, www.sco.org.uk

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