Beethoven’s “Serioso” Quartet was one of two string quartets that Mahler arranged for the Vienna Philharmonic during his first season as their music director. This fiery and mercurial work promises to be a fitting conclusion to a concert which also includes Arnold Schoenberg’s acclaimed chamber orchestra arrangement of Mahler’s Lieder eiens fahrenden Gesellen (“Songs of a Wayfarer”) Mahler’s first great song cycle, from which he drew many of the melodic ideas for his First Symphony.
May 18 – Saturday Macky Auditorium, CU Campus
6:30pm – Pre-concert Lecture
7:30pm – Orchestral Concert – The Inaugural MahlerFest Chamber Orchestra Concert!
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- Johann Strauss Jr. arr. Arnold Schoenberg – The Emperor Waltz
- Gustav Mahler arr. Arnold Schoenberg- Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer)
- Viktor Ullmann arr. Kenneth Woods – Chamber Symphony opus 46a (String Quartet no. 3) – Colorado Premiere!
- Beethoven arr. Mahler: Quartet in F Minor opus 95 “Serioso”
- Kenneth Woods conducting the Colorado MahlerFest Chamber Orchestra
- Reserved seating
The first half of this concert features two arrangements made by Arnold Schoenberg for the Society for Private Musical Performances in Vienna, a group founded by Schoenberg to allow people to hear and discuss new and unknown music in the economically challenging years following World War I before the advent of widespread use of music on the radio. Mahler was Schoenberg’s musical idol and Schoenberg’s arrangement of Mahler’s Wayfarer Songs is a great embodiment of Schoenberg’s admiration and affection for his friend and mentor. Schoenberg made his humorous and eccentric arrangement of Strauss’s greatest waltz for a fundraising concert in support of the Society in 1921 which also featured arrangements of Strauss waltzes by Schoenberg’s leading pupils, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. Schoenberg played first violin on the concert and served as the master of ceremonies for the event. It may surprise listeners to know that he earned special praise from the critics for his witty stage presence.
The second half of the concert includes string orchestra versions of two particularly intense string quartets. Mahler made his arrangement of Beethoven’s Serioso Quartet for his first season with the Vienna Philharmonic in 1899. Inspired by Mahler’s orchestrations of string quartets by Beethoven and Schubert, and Rudolf Barshai’s acclaimed arrangements of several of the Shostakovich String Quartets, Kenneth Woods arranged Viktor Ullmann’s ThIrd String Quartet as a Chamber Symphony in 1999. One of the last works Ullmann, one of the leading composers of the generation who came of age musically in the shadow of Mahler, wrote in the Theresienstadt Camp near Prague before his deportation to Auschwitz. It is a passionate and defiant work, striking testimony to the power of artists to endure and create under the most harrowing of circumstances.