Full orchestra version of Schoenberg's Transfigured Night?

[John Kim]

Tonight, I listened to Levine's beautifully molded, intensely ecstatic recording with BPO on DG. This CD really made me think the piece may sound greater in a full orchestration. Indeed, Schoenberg's ability to aptly elicit local effects in the strings is so brilliant that the music sounded as if it's played by a full orchestra.

So, I wonder if anyone has ever attempted to orchestrate it in the past?

John,

[akiralx]

I'm not sure whether the string orchestra arrangement is just the sextet parts played by full strings (with basses playing the cello parts) - as with Beethoven's quartets played by full strings - or more complex. 

I can see the addition of woodwind and maybe brass/percussion could enhance it but it's hard to imagine it somehow.

Pick up the BPO/Karajan version also, c/w the Variations op.31 I think - both among Karajan's best recordings of 20th century music.

[barry guerrero]

A fully orchestrated version of "Verklaerte Nacht" is called "Pelleas & Melisande"   

The point being that they're rather stylistically similar.

[Polarius T]

For long I searched for just that sort of an experience that you seem to have had: a perfectly luminous, radiating VN with full strings and these magnificent panoramas of sound ascending and accelerating. I think I found it in a fabulous recording by Barenboim (in my frenzy I went through basically everything available). But I've always gone back to the sextet version as played by the LaSalle Quartet (+2). They are incomparable and the piece really needs nothing more.





PT

[barry guerrero]

The performance of the "5 Orch. Pcs." on the Barenboim recording is outstanding. Chicago made a great one with Kubelik too - clear back in the middle '50s. To me, that particular work is a "high water mark" for Schoenberg.

Barry

[Polarius T]

The performance of the "5 Orch. Pcs." on the Barenboim recording is outstanding.

It is; but here I'll have to say I liked the Levine/DG recording even better (and for once haven't enjoyed Boulez). But the sound in the Barenboim is just fabulous, from both the orchestral and engineering perspective, and that matters especially much in this work.