Berg: Lyric Suite; Piano Sonata, etc CD review – efficiently played curiosities

Alban Berg set the precedent for arranging his own music when he published a version for full strings of three movements of the Lyric Suite, originally composed for string quartet. Other composers have recently continued what he began, and this disc collects together some of those string-orchestra arrangements. A performance of the complete Lyric Suite is the major work, with Berg’s three movements complemented by the other three in orchestrations by the Dutch composer Theo Verbey – though occasional awkwardness, especially in the whirling Presto delirando fifth movement, do show why Berg chose only to expand the second, third and fourth movements himself. Verbey has also made an arrangement of the Op 1 Piano Sonata, but it’s Wijnand van Klaveren’s version that the Wroclaw-based NFM Leopoldium Chamber Orchestra include here under violinist Ernst Kovacic, softening the edges of what should be an intensely inward-looking piece. Kovacic’s own arrangements of some miniatures from the time of Berg’s studies with Schoenberg are more interesting, and there’s also Alfred Schnittke’s 1987 orchestration of the tiny Canon that Berg composed in 1930 to mark the 50th anniversary of the Frankfurt Opera House, but it’s an efficiently played collection of curiosities more than anything more substantial.