Schönberg: Piano Works

Pierre-Laurent Aimard surveys Schönberg’s complete published solo piano music — written over 22 pivotal years, from 1909’s Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11 to the late, curiously neglected Op. 33 pair. As Mark Berry’s liner notes trace, the Op. 11 pieces mark Schönberg’s arrival at “free atonality,” haunted still by Brahms’s late piano style before classical form is first eroded, then “savagely” destroyed. The aphoristic Sechs kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 (1911) compress drama into near-silence, closing with a piece inspired by the bells at Mahler’s funeral, while the Fünf Klavierstücke, Op. 23 and the Suite für Klavier, Op. 25 document Schönberg’s discovery of twelve-tone composition in real time — Op. 23 No. 5 standing as his first fully dodecaphonic work, the Suite his first piece built entirely on a single twelve-note row, disguised beneath the outward shape of a Baroque dance suite. The two Op. 33 pieces close the program in a more reconciled, Brahmsian spirit, looking ahead to the 1942 Piano Concerto.

A longtime champion of 20th- and 21st-century repertoire who worked closely with Boulez, Kurtág, Ligeti, and Stockhausen, Aimard brings decades of interpretive authority to this landmark cycle, recorded at Teldex Studio in Berlin.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano