Navarro,Lucas / Wanroij,Judith / Camerata Rco Mahler 4 For Ensemble CD

Reader! Close your eyes and imagine the following - no, wait, open your eyes again, because otherwise you are not able to read this, and that's quite unpractical - so, imagine, with your eyes opened, the following: a dark afternoon in a dark caf? in Vienna, in the winter of 1921. At a small table next to the window, from which the raindrops are slowly crawling down (that means: on the outside of the window, because on the inside of the window it is not raining but smelling like schnitzel), two gentlemen are sitting. The first is about thirty-five years old. He has quite a lot of dark brown hair on his head on his name is Erwin Stein. The second gentleman is about ten years older than his companion, is in the possession of about ten times less hair on his head, and is called Arnold Schoenberg. Stein is a composer, arranger, conductor, and author of articles about contemporary music. Schoenberg is famous and infamous as the founder of modern music, in Vienna and beyond; celebrated as a progressive pioneer who paved the paths to brand new forms of expression, hated as an annoying-little-fellow-without-hair who drowned that poor innocent triad in a swampy pit of cluttered chaotic cacophony. The little-fellow-without-hair drinks a pint. Meanwhile he is trying to persuade Stein to arrange the Fourth Symphony by Gustav Mahler for chamber ensemble. For quite some time now he has been haunted by the idea to perform that wonderful piece in his Verein fur Musikalische Privatauffuhrungen, the society for contemporary music which he founded shortly after the First World War. (And a society like this was very much needed in awfully conservative Vienna: the Viennese audience had the habit to throw proverbial rotten tomatoes at anything that reeked only the slightest bit like novelty. They thought it was quite funny to sabotage modern concerts by collectively whistling on their house keys, for example. And the critics thought it was quite funny to burn all new stuff down to ashes in their reviews. So Schoenberg decided that the concerts of his Verein would be accessible to members only. And critics could not become members. Because you can't take enough precautions with those guys. Before you know it, they are sitting in the hall nonetheless, dressed in sheep's clothing, scribbling down their little sour sullen vinegary findings.)