Forbidden Love

In Arnold Schönberg's Opus 5, we experience the Viennese composer and jubilarian of the year 2024 in his late 20s. At the time, symphonic poems were all the rage from Strauss to Debussy. The love drama Pelleas and Melisande by Maurice Maeterlinck is an enigmatic fairy tale about a toxic love triangle, dark and morbid. For Arnold Schönberg, it became the inspiration for a tonally expansive, dazzling and at times ecstatic setting.
It is hard to put into words how unerringly Arnold Schoenberg, in the creative momentum of the summer of 1909, then crossed the gateway to the orchestral music of the future. A surprisingly new path with five succinctly formulated pieces for large orchestra: electrifying and expressive, with a musical color palette never heard before.
His Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra from 1933 makes it abundantly clear that Schönberg's gaze was always directed equally enthusiastically towards the musical future and the compositional past. A concerto grosso by George Frideric Handel serves as a compositional springboard. Baroque music with a wink, as if in a distorting mirror - you have to be able to do that first. The famous French Quatuor Diotima, like Schönberg a bridge builder between past and future, is this season's artist in residence with the Gürzenich Orchestra.