Alban Berg was a composer who rode to fame on only one work. His great, gloomy atonal opera, Wozzeck, is seldom performed, but it put his name in the musical history books.
Berg died at 50, in 1935. Besides Wozzeck, he left a nearly finished second opera, a brilliant violin concerto and a handful of other pieces. Last week, a Manhattan audience-heard the first U.S. performance in years of his Chamber
Concerto for Piano, Violin and Thirteen Wind Instruments—and liked it.
Composer Berg dedicated this work to his teacher, Arnold Schonberg. But he had not built it on Schonberg's "twelve-tone" technique.* Between two fast,...
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