Schoenberg: Six Songs for Soprano & Orchestra, Kol Nidrei, Golden Calf

Volume VII of the Robert Craft Schoenberg Collection begins with the early 'Six Songs for Soprano and Orchestra', in which the obvious harmonic and melodic influence of Wagner is counterbalanced by a more personal instrumentation. It has taken three quarters of a century to capture a performance of 'Six Pieces for male Chorus' with such intonation, clarity and balance of polyphonic lines as to do justice to the originality and beauty of the composition. 'Kol Nidre' is a little-known small-scale masterpiece. The excerpts from the 'Golden Calf' scene of Schoenberg's unfinished opera 'Moses und Aron' depict the sacrifice of the Young Girl and a quartet of Naked Virgins, followed by an orgy of destruction and suicide.