Music Reviews : Schoenberg Double at Two UCLA Sites

UCLA’s notion of a movie followed by a stage show was unlikely to remind anyone present on Sunday afternoon of the glory days of Radio City Music Hall.

Part one of the double bill took place in a lecture hall, the first public screening of a 50-minute-long film, “Arnold Schoenberg: My Evolution,” whereupon the audience repaired, appropriately, to Schoenberg Hall for a program of works by Schoenberg and his celebrated pupils presented by the Netherlands’ crackerjack Schoenberg Quartet.

At the core of the film, assembled by UCLA’s Bill Wolfe and Robert Winter with the assistance of USC’s Schoenberg Institute and the composer’s family, is a wire recording of a lecture presented at UCLA by faculty member Schoenberg in 1949.

Speaking in thickly accented English, the composer does not offer the expected exegesis of the 12-tone system, but rather describes the route taken to reach the point where he could abandon traditional methods of composition.

On-screen illustrations include many of the composer’s own superb paintings. Notated musical examples are shown and executed on the sound track by instrumentalists from the UCLA faculty and via commercial recordings.

Schoenberg’s talk reveals the uncluttered thoughts of a gentle revolutionary, an artist with a profound respect for the past and for musical order: “Comprehensibility is tantamount,” he avers. He sagely notes that critics tend to overemphasize the difference between the new and the old in art, as if the new had no foundation.

Even with erratic projection, the shortcomings of 1949 recording technology and that occasionally impenetrable accent, a complex subject was rendered accessible.

The subsequent concert by the Dutch ensemble--violinists Janneke van der Meer and Wim de Jong, violist Henk Guittart, cellist Viola de Hoog--complemented the film with music predating the formulation of the 12-tone system.

After a surprisingly unkempt reading of the first movement of Alban Berg’s Quartet, the players settled down to their customary mix of probingly dramatic interpretation within the context of a big, vibrantly Romantic tone.

The profound melancholy of the three slow components of Anton Webern’s Five Pieces, Opus 5, was shatteringly projected. And there could be nothing but admiration for the compendium of virtues--technical, organizational, emotional--these players brought to that gorgeous, intractable monster, the young Schoenberg’s own vast Quartet in D minor, Opus 7.