Overview

Mezzo-soprano Irene Roberts joins Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles and the San Francisco Symphony for Berg’s Seven Early Songs. Although Berg was in his early 20s at the time and a devoted disciple of Schoenberg, these surging and sumptuous songs reveal his late-Romantic leanings, too. Occasional touches of Strauss, Mahler, Brahms, Debussy, and Wagner combine with Berg’s rigorous originality in an appealing package. Mahler understood the value of his First Symphony right away, confessing that conducting it “sent shivers down my spine.” Mahler ensures all our senses will be fully engaged from the opening movement, a deliciously drawn-out meditation on D major that deploys harmonics in the strings to create its cosmic drone—an effect he described as “a shimmering and glimmering of the air.” You can best believe it’s still bejeweled.