Vier Stücke for Clarinet and Piano, Op. 5
Performed by Gleb Kanasevich (Clarinet), Steven Beck (Piano)
As head of the Association for Contemporary Music in Ukraine, Liatoshynsky championed the music of Alban Berg, whose works were performed at the association’s concerts. Berg’s Vier Stücke are considered the composer’s only true miniatures, written just before he began work on his opera Wozzeck. Considered the member of the Second Viennese School who retained the most compositional “Romanticism” in his experiments with tonality, Berg’s four miniatures have sometimes been compared to the four-movement structure of a conventional sonata: a fast opening, a slow second movement, a playful third movement, and a “grand” finale.