NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra / Augustin Hadelich / Alan Gilbert

The name Arnold Schönberg triggers anxiety among some music lovers: the inventor of the twelve-tone technique has the reputation of a complex modern composer who provoked several scandals with his radically short pieces, where the music is reduced to essentials. But there was also another side to Schönberg: in 1902/03, just a few years before he abandoned the stable world of tonality, the Viennese composer wrote his monumental tone poem »Pelleas und Melisande«, based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s Symbolist play of the same name about the doomed love of the title characters. The 45-minute score for a gigantic orchestra shows the future twelve-tone composer as a Late Romantic successor of Wagner, Mahler and Strauss.

Schönberg’s later road to the dissolution of conventional harmonies and intervals was followed all the more rigourously in 1960 by György Ligeti: his »Apparitions« for orchestra no longer adhere to the established movements of notes, but instead – so the Hungarian composer said – to »ramified musical labyrinths filled with sounds and gentle noises«.