Aurora Orchestra perform Schreker's Chamber Symphony at Kings Place

Listen to a performance from Aurora Orchestra at Kings Place that was recorded during their From Vienna to Weimar series of concerts in January 2010. They will be returning in 2011 to be part of our Mozart Unwrapped series! Franz Schreker (1878–1934) might be regarded as exemplifying the very late-Romanticism that composers such as Hindemith and Weill were determined to leave behind. Yet Weill actually held Schreker in high esteem and was at one point hoping to study with him. The Chamber Symphony of 1916 was commissioned for the centenary of the Vienna Academy where Schreker had been teaching since 1912. Some of the musical material originates in an unfinished operatic project from these years, Die tönenden Sphären (The Sounding Spheres): it seems likely that the magical, shimmering opening of the Chamber Symphony was destined to play a musico-symbolic role similar to that found in Schreker’s other operas (Fritz’s elusive ‘distant sound’ in Der ferne Klang, for example). Like Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie Op. 9, the work compresses the separate movements of a traditional symphony into a single larger one – but the similarities end there. Compared to Schoenberg’s densely written, contrapuntally saturated score, the Schreker inhabits an impressionistic, almost dream-like world in which a continuous process of thematic transformation and restatement is realized in orchestral textures of beguiling beauty and iridescence. Notes by Lloyd Moore