Music Reviews : Schoenberg Festival Under Way at USC

USC’s weeklong Schoenberg Festival opened in Hancock Auditorium on Sunday afternoon. The program comprised his Fourth Quartet(1936), which seems to last forever, and the Second Quartet (1908), which one wishes would last forever in a reading as accomplished as that by soprano Arleen Auger and the Schonberg Quartet from the Hague, which will present all five quartets as well as “Verklarte Nacht” and the String Trio this week.

What saves the Fourth Quartet from utter tedium--important as the entire work may be--is the third movement, with its thrillingly proclamatory unison opening followed by an arioso which exemplifies the Brahmsian breadth and grandeur toward which Schoenberg claimed to be striving even in his atonal works.

The present players--violinists Janneke van der Meer and Wim de Jong, violist Henk Guittart and cellist Hans Woudenberg--executed it with big, luscious tone and plenty of throbbing vibrato, the effect heightened by the very live Hancock acoustic.

But it was the younger, Romantic Schoenberg--in fact still Schonberg then--who commanded and held the attention across the vast lyric arches of his Second Quartet.

The Hollanders played it boldly, almost fiercely, disdaining, to the score’s advantage, the portamentos familiar from the classic interpretation of the late La Salle Quartet.

An audience’s ultimate perception of the Second Quartet is, however, in the hands of the soloist, above all in the setting of Stefan George’s visionary “I feel the air of other planets” within the context of music taken to the outermost limits of tonality.

Music and poetry found in soprano Auger a voice of otherworldly beauty and a textual interpreter of the most rarefied perceptiveness.