BERG Three Pieces from “Lyric Suite”
R. STRAUSS Suite from “Der Rosenkavalier”

This recording of Alban Berg’s Three Pieces from Lyric Suite and a Suite in Three Parts from Richard Strauss’s opera Der Rosenkavalier, compiled by Franz Welser-Möst, pairs two early-20th-century masterpieces grappling with an all-consuming love and lust through vastly expressive but different means.

A member of the Second Viennese school, Berg wrote the Lyric Suite while he was infatuated with Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Both were married, yet Berg inscribed and intertwined their initials into a six-movement suite for string quartet. These cyphers and codes simmer subliminally under music that merges 12-tone techniques pioneered by Arnold Schoenberg with echoes of early 19th-century romanticism. Berg later arranged the second, third, and fourth sections for string orchestra to create the Three Pieces, a trio of intense and passionately argued movements captured on this recording.

The latent romanticism of Berg is brought into full relief in the Suite in Three Parts from Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier. Compiled by Cleveland Music Director Franz Welser-Möst, each part draws material from the opera’s respective act. Though the opera takes place in 18th-century Austria, Strauss employs the 19th-century Viennese waltz as a clever commentary on old-fashioned mores of a timeless past. Simultaneously tinged with nostalgia and pushing toward the future, Strauss’s music does no less than examine the human condition, from the exhilaration of early romance to the humiliation of rejection to the bittersweet melancholy that comes with the passage of time.