Gemmo, Francesca
Janacek, Schoenberg: An Imaginary Conversation
An Imaginary Conversation follows Janacek and Schoenberg from youthful works to the attainment of two opposed yet secretly related modern languages. The Zdenka Variations and the Klavierstucke of 1894 reveal a nineteenth-century inheritance still at work/ On an Overgrown Path and Schoenbergs fragments turn memory and incompletion into formal principles. At the centre the Sonata 1.X.1905 translates historical trauma into private pressure while the Drei Klavierstucke op. 11 free coherence from tonal grammar. On one side are Janaceks speech rhythm, obsession and figurative drama/ on the other, Schoenbergs motivic concentration and abstraction. The programmes novel architecture makes the piano a theatre of decisions, probing the frontier between inheritance and rupture, notation and sound.