3 Pieces for Orchestra

The title may sound dauntingly abstract, but the music of Berg’s 3 Pieces for Orchestra is wild, intense, profoundly unsettling, at times almost hallucinogenic. When Berg went to study with the archmodernist Schoenberg, his output was dominated by songs, his style indebted to Schubert, Schumann, Wagner and his idol Mahler. But Schoenberg saw huge potential, and he pushed his pupil to try writing on a larger scale. Eventually, in 1913, Berg took the plunge and began work on this volcanic masterpiece, a kind of catastrophic post-Mahlerian symphony for huge orchestra, compressed into just 20 minutes. Daringly, the first movement ("Präludium") emerges from and finally disappears back into unpitched percussion sounds. This is followed by a “Round Dance” ("Reigen"), which weirdly blurs elements of slow movement and scherzo. The increasingly ominous mood at last bursts out into the terrifying "March" (“Marsch”), and here it is difficult to fend off the impression that Berg foresaw the forthcoming catastrophe of World War I and the destruction of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire in which he had been born and raised. The ending is like the soundtrack to an appalling cinematic murder: there is one last blow, heightened by the Mahlerian use of a hammer, then silence.