Webern’s Miniature Universe, Finely Calibrated
Naxos 8.554841
The Ulster Orchestra under Takuo Yuasa offers something increasingly rare in Webern recordings—a sense of discovery rather than dutiful preservation. This isn’t the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan, all gleaming surfaces and intimidating precision. It’s something more human, which turns out to be exactly what this music needs.
Start with the Passacaglia, Opus 1, and you’re immediately in late-romantic Vienna, all those arching phrases and rich string sonorities that speak of Mahler and Brahms without quite achieving their mastery. Webern was twenty-five when he wrote it, still finding his voice—or rather, still using Schoenberg’s voice, filtered through a temperament already inclined toward compression and refinement. The Ulster strings don’t possess the sheer tonal luxury of the great European ensembles, but Yuasa shapes the long crescendos with real understanding, allowing the music to breathe without wallowing.
Then comes the plunge into atonality. The Five Movements for String Orchestra, Opus 5 (the liner notes confusingly reference a string quartet version that doesn’t appear here) mark the decisive break—fragments, gestures, silences weighted with meaning. This is where Yuasa’s achievement becomes clear. He doesn’t try to prettify or romanticize. The attacks are clean but not antiseptic, the dynamic contrasts sharp without being exaggerated. In the fourth movement, those pizzicato figures emerge from silence with exactly the right combination of delicacy and definition.
The Six Pieces, Opus 6, contain that devastating funeral march—music of such concentrated grief that its two-minute duration feels simultaneously too brief and almost unbearable. Yuasa builds the central crescendo with inexorable logic, the tam-tam stroke at the climax placed with surgical precision. Yes, Karajan achieved something more overwhelming here, but at the cost of a certain Wagnerian inflation. The Ulster reading stays truer to Webern’s essential economy.
I’m less convinced by the Five Pieces, Opus 10. These miniatures—the longest runs barely a minute—demand not just precision but a kind of crystalline transparency that eludes this ensemble. The third piece, with its nuanced interplay of solo instruments, sounds slightly murky, the spatial relationships not quite clarified. This is music that needs either perfect conditions or players so intimately familiar with the idiom that they can project it through less-than-ideal acoustics.
The Symphony, Opus 21, fares better. Yuasa understands that serial composition doesn’t mean abandoning expression—it means locating expression within new structural relationships. The canonic writing in the first movement emerges with admirable clarity, though I wish for more dynamic nuance in the variations. The second movement’s theme and variations unfold with proper architectural logic, if not quite the epigrammatic wit that Pierre Boulez brings to this music.
The Variations, Opus 30, conclude the program—Webern’s last completed orchestral work, written in 1940 as Europe collapsed into war. The Ulster players navigate the serial complexities with commendable accuracy, though the performance lacks something of the work’s latent violence. This music can sound cerebral and detached; it can also sound like a scream trapped in a crystal cage. Yuasa tends toward the former interpretation.
Richard Whitehouse’s liner notes deserve mention—lucid, informative, free of the jargon that too often obscures rather than illuminates this repertoire. He makes a convincing case for Webern’s historical importance without overstating it, acknowledging both the music’s radical innovations and its limitations.
The Ulster Hall acoustic proves generally sympathetic, though occasionally the lower strings lack sufficient weight and the winds (in Opus 6 and Opus 10) don’t quite bloom as they should. These are superbudget recordings, after all, and expecting Musikverein sonorities would be unreasonable.
Does this disc displace the classic Karajan recordings? No. Will it serve admirably as an introduction to Webern’s orchestral music, or as a supplement to more expensive versions? Absolutely. Yuasa conducts with intelligence and respect, the Ulster Orchestra plays with dedication and skill, and Naxos has assembled a well-chosen program that traces Webern’s evolution from post-romantic epigone to serial pioneer.
At this price, the disc represents exceptional value. Even those who own multiple Webern cycles will find things to admire here—particularly in the Passacaglia and Opus 5, where Yuasa’s straightforward approach clarifies structures that can disappear under excessive interpretive gloss. Recommended, with the caveat that this music’s ultimate mysteries remain tantalizingly out of reach.
