September 10, 2024

OSM and Rafael Payare Celebrate Arnold Schoenberg’s 150th Birthday

PENTATONE releases Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande & Verklärte Nacht, together with Orchestre symphonique de Montréal & Rafael Payare, in October 2024.

Schoenberg’s Late-Romantic Masterworks

The Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and its Music Director Rafael Payare celebrate Arnold Schoenberg’s 150th birthday with a recording of two of his late-Romantic masterworks: Verklärte Nacht and Pelleas und Melisande. Both pieces are based on stories evolving around love, jealousy, acceptance and forgiveness, and showcase Schoenberg’s expressive harmonic language and scintillating, multifarious orchestration. The album booklet features unique photography and paintings by Arnold Schoenberg, sketching a vivid picture of this extraordinarily versatile artist.

After their acclaimed PENTATONE recordings of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (2023), as well as his Rückert-Lieder and Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben (2024), Payare and the orchestra further explore this late-Romantic repertoire that fits them like a glove.

“This album represents the latest chapter of an artistic project I have undertaken with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal: the pursuit and development of an aural and expressive aesthetic inherent in the Germanic post-Romantic repertoire. After recordings of Mahler and Richard Strauss, I am especially delighted to be continuing in this vein with Schoenberg’s ‘Verklärte Nacht’ and ‘Pelleas und Melisande’. We warmly invite you to discover these two remarkably sumptuous works, recorded in the exceptional acoustics of the Maison symphonique de Montréal.”

Rafael Payare Music Director, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal

Digital Release Date11 OCTOBER 2024

Physical Release: OCTOBER 2024

Released as a standard CD. and in digital formats for streaming and high-resolution downloads