Schreker: Kleine Suite, für Kammerorchester

In 1927 the German Radio commissioned a number of composers to write works specifically for radio. The first in the series was Schreker's Kleine Suite (Little Suite), premiered in a nationwide broadcast from Breslau. The work, scored for chamber orchestra and written specifically with the limitations of the microphone in mind, is a fascinating distillation of the iridescent Schreker style familiar from his Vorspiel zu einem Drama. As Walther Gmeindl noted in 1928, Schreker's later orchestral style „the colours are no longer achieved through doublings in the individual sections of the orchestra but thanks to the sharp contrasts between the distinctly delineated voices of the woodwind, the strings and the brass" And yet Schreker's sensitivity to mixture and balance is everywhere in evidence, as in his beguiling paring of Bb clarinet and tenor saxophone in C over harp ostinato at the beginning of the Intermenzzo - a sly reinterpretation of the intoxicating opening bars of his Vorspiel zu einem Drama.

In the Little Suite we hear those angular, linear qualities already presaged in portions of the pantomime Der Geburtstag der Infantin of 1908 and the Chamber Symphony of 1916. The six movements of the suite - Präludium, Marcia, Canon, Fughetta, Intermezzo, Capriccio - are often contrapuntal in character and neoclassical in tone, but their sprightly wit and wry pathos are vintage Schreker.