Violinist Rainer Honeck comes to Việt Nam, performing with Việt Nam National Symphony Orchestra on the celebration of the 150th birthday of Austrian composer Arnold Schonberg. — Photo musicacademy.org

HÀ NỘI — Austrian violinist Rainer Honeck will perform with Việt Nam National Symphony Orchestra (VNSO) to celebrate the 150th birthday of composer Arnold Schoenberg on March 23.

The violinist has been concertmaster of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra since 1992. He is a renowned soloist, with concert appearances in Austria as well as in Europe, Japan and America.

Personal highlights with the Vienna Philharmonic include Dvorak’s Violin Concerto, Mozart’s concertos and Herbert Blomstedt and Berg’s Violin Concerto.

He also played the Berg concerto with the Symphony Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre under Valery Gergiev and the New World Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas. Further he performed the Stravinsky Violin Concerto and with the London Symphony Orchestra under Daniel Harding.

Honeck plays the “ex-Hämmerle” Stradivarius violin (1709). The instrument is a loan from the Austrian National Bank.

In the concert Music from Vienna at Việt Nam National Academy of Music (VNAM)'s great hall, Honeck will premiere Alban Berg's Violin Concerto (To the Memory of an Angel).

This piece, Berg’s only solo concerto, evolved according to the twelve-tone principles that the composer had learned from composer Schoenberg.

Schoenberg (1874-1951) was an influential Austrian-American composer and music teacher. He led aspects of the expressionist art movement and the Second Viennese School approach to classical music. He was heavily influenced by German techniques – particularly atonality, or music unrestrained by key.

As much as he was a composer, Schoenberg was also an inventor when he was one of the first developers of the twelve-tone method (also known as serialism), a technique in which notes are grouped in sets of twelve and have no tonality, or relationship to each other. This revolutionary technique would garner Schoenberg his greatest acclaim.

His career began at the turn of the twentieth century and spanned several decades.

Verklärte Nacht was composed for string sextet in 1899. Despite an earlier, well-received string quartet, it is considered Schoenberg's first important work, a masterpiece that remains his best known and most accessible music.

The piece will be performed by VNSO under the baton of conductor Tetsuji Honna. The VNSO will also play Johann Strauss II's The Blue Danube Waltz to close the concert. — VNS