Zoltán Kocsis Schoenberg/Varese:Pelleas & Melisande

Many hidden threads link the two compositions on this disc, despite
the fact that they are apparently unrelated: one of them is a slightly
megalomaniac farewell to great German romanticism, the other is
a fine example of the new wave of experimentation that followed
the Rite of Spring, and about which Stravinsky himself expressed his
praise. Claude Debussy worked for ten years to create a truly French
drama from Belgian poet Maurice Maeterlinck s dreamlike drama,
Pelléas et Mélisande. It was this work that finally liberated composers
from the influence of Richard Wagner (and particularly Tristan and
Isolde). By an irony of fate, only a year after Debussy s anti-Tristan
premiere, a young man from Vienna, who had been working in Berlin
from 1901 to 1903 a certain Arnold Schönberg completed his
own score of Pelleas. Far from turning from Wagner, it seemed to
follow the escape route Wagner himself had indicated. True, it was not
opera, but rather wordless program music that Wagner s followers and
supporters took to their hearts. Edgard Varese (1883 1965) wrote only
a couple of hours worth of music in his lifetime and yet he exerted
a remarkable influence on the direction of 20th-century music. His
composition Amériques was written between 1918 and 1921.