Search - Hanns Eisler, Mathias Husmann, Magdeburg Philharmonic :: Hanns Eisler: Orchestral Works

Twelve-tone music you can listen to

Andrew G. Lang | Cleveland, OH USA | 09/13/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Hanns Eisler's great passion in life was music that could communicate. His experiments in the twelve-tone method he learned from his teacher, Schoenberg, show that this style--which is still opaque to many concert goers even after nearly eighty years as a musical idiom--can reach the listener on more than an intellectual plane.The brief "Chamber Symphony" is identical in orchestration to Eisler's film score for "White Flood"--a 1941 documentary on the Arctic Ocean. Using electronic instruments (which in the early 40s was an unusual move for a classical composer)in combination with a small chamber orchestra, the music communicates the slow but powerful forces that shaped the Arctic ice sheet. The equally brief "Small Symphony" was composed during a break during a time when Eisler was otherwise occupied with revolutionary politics in Weimar-Republic Berlin. Combining avant-garde with traditional tonality, it is one of the composer's most engaging works."