Schoenberg: Die glückliche Hand, Op. 18

This page lists all recordings of Die glückliche Hand, Op. 18, by Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951) on CD. Generally, more recent CDs are listed first, but with priority given to items that are in stock.

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Schoenberg - Chamber Symphony No. 2

Schoenberg:

Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38b

The little-known Second Chamber Symphony ought to be the most popular of Schoenberg’s later masterpieces. Neither “atonal” nor “twelve-tone”, it contrasts a lush, melodious, dramatic first movement with a rapid and richly polyphonic second movement.

Die glückliche Hand, Op. 18

Die glückliche Hand is a pantomime for two silent actors and one solo singer, “the Man”. The music is very compressed, and its two middle scenes, apart from the lines by the Man, are purely orchestral.

Quintet for Flute, Oboe, Clarinet, Horn and Bassoon, Op. 26

Realising that a work of 38 minutes in atonal idiom for five winds might be less audience-friendly than any of his music heretofore, Schoenberg imparted his Wind Quintet with a display of instrumental virtuosity that surpassed anything even he had ever attempted.

Mark Beesley (bass)

Simon Joly Chorale, New York Woodwind Quintet & Philharmonia Orchestra, Robert Craft

“Craft has been recording his way through Schoenberg’s oeuvre for Naxos, and this disc is a particularly enjoyable stage, though not all will agree. The quintet, Schoenberg’s first large-scale use of serialism, is often seen as just about his most refractory work. But, as Craft explains, this has much to do with the fact that the difficult score has tended to be taken disastrously slowly. Here, the relentless polyphony is crisp and dazzling. The experimental Die glückliche Hand drama is a sharp contrast to the quintet’s neoclassicism, and the two-movement symphony, with its beguiling rediscovery of tonality, different again.” Sunday Times, 29th June 2008 ***

“All [works] are first-rate. Craft is at his most persuasive in the Chamber Symphony - a curious hangover from 1906, which Schoenberg only completed in 1939. By then, his music was utterly different, and if the weirdly symbolic Glückliche Hand ideally needs a more vividly analytical sound than here, it's a rarely recorded piece that is one of the masterpieces of his expressionist period. The Wind Quintet comes as the biggest surprise, though. In an unsympathetic performance, it can seem one of the driest of Schoenberg's 12-note pieces, but the New York Woodwind Quintet show that, with the proper treatment, it takes on a charm of its own.” The Guardian, 2nd May 2008 ****