29 Aug 2010

At Bard Festival, placing Berg at center of modern musical Vienna

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/articles/2010/08/29/alban_berg_the_focus_of_the_21st_annual_bard_music_festival/

By Jeremy Eichler [Boston Globe, 29 August 2010]

ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — The year in the photo is 1920. The great Viennese composer Alban Berg, 35 years old, stands at an open window of his Vienna home, gazing directly out at the camera yet also somehow beyond it. His face conceals like a mask. The breakthrough triumph of his first opera, “Wozzeck,’’ is five years in the unknowable future. We sense perhaps an air of reserved confidence, perhaps a tint of melancholy. But there is more to this picture.