So much genuinely new music is only ever performed once
I recently heard a performance of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra at the BBC Proms, 107 years after they received its premiere there, conducted by Henry Wood. Even among those of us who actively enjoy seeking out ‘contemporary’ music to play or listen to, Schoenberg has a bit of an image problem.
With the possible exception of Verklärte Nacht and a couple of other early works, his music has a reputation for leaving audiences cold – not everyone shares his determination to liberate music from tonality at all costs. Not that this is anything new: a review of the 1912 premiere of the Five Pieces in these pages declared that Schoenberg’s music ‘will remain a puzzle for a long time, though that is no reason why it should not be listened to with a serious endeavour to understand the method of writing’.