Editor Reviews:

Amazon.com:
Pierre Boulez's Complete Webern Edition appears just over two decades after his last traversal. Well, it's not literally complete, but does have enough early works to set the mature ones in the right context. These days, Webern is no longer seen so much as a new music guru as he is a major composer, pure and simple--his expression as concise as it is intense. Performancewise, there's a quality of musicianship here that few previous recordings have matched; familiarity with the idiom certainly plays its part, but so does Boulez's belief that what we're hearing needs to be presented with conviction. Try the Passacaglia, sensuous music that combines the soundworld of Brahms and Mahler, or the string quartet or orchestra pieces--miniatures in duration, but whole dramas of expression.

Ease of performance doesn't always make this music easy to come to grips with: the song cycles need several listenings to grasp the meaning behind the compression, while the later instrumental and choral works have a luminous austerity that looks back to Bach and beyond to Renaissance masters such as Schütz and Isaac. While much of Webern's music has long been admired, only now is it becoming possible to respond to it through the heart as well as the brain. This set, superbly packaged and comprehensively documented, marks a major step forward, and deserves investigating by anyone keen to appreciate something of the music's quiet, calm essence in an often strident, dislocated century. --Richard Whitehouse

Rating : - a superb achievement
I share the very positive sentiments of the other reviewers. I have heard both of the Boulez anthologies and prefer this one, although the other is excellent too. Compared to the classic Karajan Webern single CD with the same orchestra, which I also admire, the newer Boulez performances of the same pieces are marked by equally fantastic orchestral playing, and even better recording quality, which makes the extreme dynamics of Webern's writing more effective. If there is a better Opus 1 by any composer than Webern's Passacaglia, I would like to hear it. The Schubert and especially Bach arrangements on the first CD are first class. In my view, all the performances are successful - with special kudos to the soprano Christiane Oelze and the Emerson String Quartet. The documentation, in substance and presentation, is excellent too.

Personally, I find with Webern's work something in common with that of Bach, a kind of absolute purity of expression, or however you may wish to describe it (which is not implying that Webern is every bit as great as Bach though). They are totally concentrated in expression and require the same level of involvement not only from the performer but also to a large measure the listener too. I think these aleatory, uncompromising pieces will never be popular with the mainstream classical music loving audience (my local symphony orchestra has not performed a mature Webern work in recent memory, if ever), but for those willing to make the time and effort to "do the homework" and listen to the pieces again and again, they will reap the benefits, as with Bach, of great spiritual experience. Personally, I find the Webern cantatas especially beautiful.

Just a matter of personal taste, for those who are "dipping their toes" into these difficult pieces, I find the vocal works a little more approachable at first than the purely instrumental ones. Webern's pointillistic, ascerbic writing can initially give a very cold, forbidding, austere impression - so much so that one is tempted to stop listening. The vocal works offer, for lack of a better term, a warmer, more "lyrical" sound. Das Augenlicht for mixed chorus and orchestra on CD 2 is a good example. Yet there is underlying emotional and spiritual depth, somehow enhanced by the absence of sentimentality. One could make a similar observation about Bach's The Art of Fugue, or has been noted elsewhere, Flemish Renaissance music. The latter is also marked by severe economy of expression, and Webern was thoroughly familiar with it.

The price is very fair for such an outstanding album. I do not expect another one like it to be made for a very long time.