Schoenberg: Chamber Symphony No. 2, Op. 38b

"As an example of Naxos's daring these days, for only its second disc of Schoenberg, it has headed for the Second Chamber Symphony - a work begun in 1906 but not completed after 1939 - rather than the familiar First. Like the Gurrelieder, which was part-orchestrated after Schoenberg's style had moved on from his late-Romantic phase, so the Second Chamber Symphony bears the mark of those missing 33 years in its combination of chromaticism and more acerbic dynamism. The Ulster Orchestra gives a vibrant performance of the work." - BBC Music Magazine (Matthew Rye), October 2000

“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 ****