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Music of the Second Vienna School was condemned as noise on first reception. How deaf is that? The greatest asset of these revolutionary works is their quietude. The arresting opus 1 sonata of Alban Berg achieves a 12-minute span of introspection without an obvious atonal tantrum. Berg was the most lyrical of the Schoenberg crowd but the softness of this sonata is its winning virtue, never more so than in the hands of the Vienna-based Russian pianist Elisabeth Leonskaya. Beauty becomes even more wondrous when it is literally off the scale.
A Mozartian at heart, Leonskaya has more trouble at locating calm inside Anton von Webern’s Variations for piano, opus 27, dated 1936. Try using a calculator. Everything in Webern is mathematically related to some other numeral. If you do Sudoku, you’ll be in heaven.
Arnold Schoenberg, towering above his disciples, is represented by two sets of aphorisms, opus 11 and 19, and a complete suite, opus 25. Often angry, Schoenberg finds tranquil beauty in his keyboard writing, allied to an impossible intensity. If this sounds like a contradiction, just listen. Leonskaya’s is the most commanding interpretation I have heard since Maurizio Pollini’s, several decades ago.
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