This disc conveniently gathers all the published piano music of the Second Viennese School. It illuminates the profound differences between the three composers, something further clarified by the music's presentation in chronological order. Berg's terse, haunted piano sonata harnesses his emotionally charged music to a strict if not immediately perceptible form. For Schoenberg the piano was a laboratory where each new development of his musical language first appeared, from free atonality to the twelve-tone system, from pseudo-baroque forms to the final freedom of his late works. The Webern Variations couple the composer's late romantic ardor with his formal experiments that would bear such controversial fruit in the decades after the war. This performance incorporates recent research that suggests that Webern expected a much more romantic style of playing than is usually heard in his music. The effect is hallucinatory.
Peter Hill, whose Messiaen series on Unicorn-Kanchana is a milestone of contemporary piano recording, offers ardent, romantic performances of this sometimes forbidding music. His Schoenberg resembles Paul Jacobs' beautiful readings and his inclusion of the Berg and Webern at a bargain price make this an indispensable release.