"The soprano Svetlana Savenko is a distinguished Moscow academic as well as a composer, and evidently a specialist in 20th-century and contemporary music. Certainly her survey of all the surviving songs that Anton Webern composed with piano accompaniment shows a full understanding of how Webern’s music developed. Three of the cycles, to poems by a variety of the usual 19th-century German suspects, predate Webern’s first encounter with Schoenberg and show the young composer getting to grips with the language of late Romanticism, everything from Schumann to Richard Strauss. It’s with the five songs on poems by Richard Dehmel and four set to those of Stefan George, both written after he began to study with Schoenberg, that Webern moved towards the freely associating harmony of his first published works. That development is continued in the first songs with opus numbers, his Op 3 and 4, also using George’s poems. In the Four Songs, Op 12, the style was pared down further, and by the songs of Op 23 and Op 25, both on texts by Hildegard Jone, Webern was using 12-note technique, and the clipped, aphoristic style of his late, great instrumental works."   ***

The Guardian - March 2007