Ottavio Dantone

“A chamber orchestra plays a melody. Rather, it describes a melody, but only as a shadow describes an object and an echo describes a sound. The melody runs on without end, yet it is interrupted by flashbacks and digressions around a shifting and distant center, a center perhaps not perceptible to the listener.” Thus Luciano Berio described Requies (1984), dedicated to his wife, the singer and composer Cathy Berberian, who had died the previous year. Finally free: in 1790 Haydn’s employer, Prince Nikolaus I Esterházy, passed away. When his son dismissed him into retirement, the freelancer arranged with impresario Johann Peter Salomon to present six new symphonies at his subscription concerts in London. Symphony No. 93 was composed in the spring of 1791 and premiered with great success in February 1792 at the opening of the “Salomon Concerts.” Three months later, the series closed with Haydn’s Symphony No. 97. In Central Europe’s fin de siècle, the world still seemed in order: the Austrian composer Franz Schreker conceived his Intermezzo around 1900, at the age of 22. Submitting it to a competition for a “small characteristic orchestral piece for string instruments,” he won first prize thanks to its part-writing and the “resulting sonority.”