The Romantic Lyricism of Schoenberg and Brahms

Rafael Payare, conductor
Sergey Khachatryan, violin

BRAHMS: Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77
SCHOENBERG: Pelléas und Mélisande, Op. 5

Brahms’s only violin concerto – and one of the very greatest examples of this form in the history of music – is here performed by the SDSO and Rafael Payare with the celebrated Armenian violinist Sergey Khachatryan. Following Beethoven’s lofty example, Brahms wrote a piece that simultaneously makes massive demands upon a top virtuoso soloist, while at the same time having the depth, beauty, scale and orchestral muscularity of a great symphony. Rafael Payare is world-renowned for his interpretations of Brahms’ symphonies, and this performance will surely bring out the most remarkable qualities of his music. Payare is also a passionate champion of the music of Arnold Schoenberg, and serves on the Artistic Honorary Committee of Schönberg 150, celebrating the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Schoenberg began his long creative life in Vienna in the high romantic age of Brahms, Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, and ended it in Los Angeles as an American citizen in 1951, at one of the high points of 20th century modernism. Schoenberg’s gorgeously scored and richly melodic tone-poem, based on the tragic love-story of Pelléas et Mélisande, which also inspired great music from Fauré, Debussy and Sibelius, is one of his most beautiful orchestral scores, written in a style somewhere between Brahms and Wagner but with a rich and dark orchestral coloring that is all Schoenberg’s own.