5 Pieces

Webern assembled his Five Pieces for Orchestra from a larger sequence of very short orchestral movements composed between 1911 and 1913. The result was an early masterwork of his by now ultra-concentrated and spare brand of modernism. The influence on the music of Mahler’s orchestral style, distilled down to an essence, is unmistakable. Webern originally gave each piece a title—“Urbild” (“Primeval Image”), “Verwandlung” (“Transformation”), “Rückkehr” (“Return”), “Erinnerung” (“Memory”) and “Seele” (“Soul”)—but these did not appear in the published score. The “orchestra” here is essentially an enlarged chamber group, with solo woodwind and brass, and solo strings instead of a full orchestral section. There is also a range of “colour instruments” including guitar and mandolin; these are deployed with evocative loveliness in the still and ultra-quiet third piece, where distant tubular bells and cowbells conjure an Austrian mountain landscape of the kind that Webern, like Mahler, loved deeply. The fourth piece, suggesting a tiny fragment of memory, is just 30 seconds long.