Music Review : Stein in Triumphant Reading of Schoenberg in Pasadena

Ironically, the music of Arnold Schoenberg is arguably among the least encountered in this city, where he lived from 1934 until his death in 1951. Thus, Leonard Stein’s performance of the composer’s complete piano works was automatically a special event.

Stein’s recital, Tuesday night at the Neighborhood Church in Pasadena, adjacent to the Gamble House, kicked off the venturesome four-concert “Piano Spheres” series. Not coincidentally, it took place on the 120th birthday of a composer who put ample stock in the power of numbers.

“Complete works,” in this case, isn’t as daunting a prospect as it might seem. Schoenberg’s spartan repertory of piano music relies on haunting brevity and concentrated doses of both intensity and introspection.

Stein, a Schoenberg protege and longtime champion, brought a lived-in, hands-on expertise to this demanding body of work. Often hunched intently over the keyboard, Stein proceeded to exact, by memory, a measured delivery of the restless-yet-reflective piano scores that Schoenberg wrote between 1909 and 1931. Most important, Stein made this music sing, in an objective, anti-romantic way.

Even so, some of the evening’s most memorable music came not from Schoenberg, but from his early disciple, Anton Webern. The exquisitely arid tone poetry of his 1935 work Variations for Piano, Opus 27, embodies a refinement of the serial vocabulary.

By contrast, a world premiere of “Mono/Poly,” by Schoenberg’s last private pupil, Richard Hoffmann, fared badly by association. Its maze of clever post-impressionistic washes allowed no detectable link to the atonal nature of the remainder of the program.

By the time the clustering fury of the row-master’s Suite for Piano, Opus 25, came around to close the program, the subsequent ovation was well in order.