Details: The first and second Viennese school is the focus of Karim Said's third album for Rubicon. The music spans just over a century, but in that time, two composers who changed the course of music - Beethoven and Schoenberg flourished. Schoenberg's music is no longer 'modern'. It is over 100 years old. It has influences of jazz and the waltz. Just over a century earlier, Beethoven's 3rd Symphony, Eroica pushed the boundaries of the classical symphony to breaking point and ushered in a new age. Beethoven's Eroica Variations can still shock and sound a world away from Mozart and his Vienna. In many ways these variations have an affinity with 20th century piano writing. Schoenberg had turned away from late romanticism and large-scale compositions. His works here are extreme in their brevity and concentration, something his greatest pupil Webern was to develop further in his set of extremely dissonant and terse Variations.

Karim Said - Beethoven Mozart Schoenberg & Webern (CD)