Alban Berg! Dead ahead!

On this week’s “Music from Marlboro,” we’ll hear Berg’s two-movement String Quartet of 1910. Berg, a pupil of Arnold Schoenberg (whose birthday it is today) was always the Romantic among serialists – one critic described him as “the Puccini of twelve-tone music” – so it’s not difficult to divine a shimmering, unresolved longing common to the works of his more traditionally-minded Viennese contemporaries. Like much of Berg’s music, the quartet is not really a strict adherent to any system. The music wafts spectrally, sharing tonal and atonal characteristics, a kind of fever dream of uncertainty.

There will be no lack of commitment in the performance, which dates from 1984. We’ll experience Marlboro excellence in the form of Ida Levin and Felix Galimir, violins; Benjamin Simon, viola; and Sara Sant’Ambrogio, cello.

Then we’ll emerge from the fin de siècle hothouse to unwind in the late summer radiance of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major. It will be performed, from 1968, by chamber music luminaries Harold Wright, clarinet; Alexander Schneider and Isadore Cohen, violins; Samuel Rhodes, viola; and Leslie Parnas, cello.

I hope you’ll join me for another “Music from Marlboro,” this Wednesday evening at 6, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.

Marlboro School of Music and Festival: Official Page

PHOTO: Alban Berg cools down