Vienna Philharmonic 1

The chaste and deeply religious composer Anton Bruckner dedicated his Ninth Symphony to God. Alban Berg, on the other hand, created an apparently “amoral” opera about the femme fatale Lulu, even glorifying his heroine as an “angel” after her death — in what would seem to be a rather blasphemous interpretation of the Catholic veneration of saints! Musically, too, these two masters are worlds apart: one composed in a late-Romantic style, the other according to the rules of twelve-tone theory. So there seems to be little to connect the works that Franz Welser-Möst has selected for this concert with the Vienna Philharmonic. Yet there are surprising overlaps in what is perhaps the most daring and revealing program pairing of the summer. Neither Bruckner nor Berg was able to complete their scores. But what Bruckner’s Ninth and Berg’s Lulu share above all is an Expressionist approach to musical language. In both, expression is taken to the extreme. Melodic lines are stretched to the breaking point, building on huge leaps between notes. At the end, we are left to wonder: who in fact is the Modernist here and who is the Romantic?