Simon Rattle’s Messiaen is improving with age

Two flutes, a clarinet and a bassoon breathe a chord on the edge of silence. As they fade, the sound quietly intensifies, morphing into the metallic buzz of cor anglais and muted horn. The third of Arnold Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces of 1909 doesn’t have a conventional melody, and there’s even less in the way of rhythmic or harmonic activity. It’s entirely about those minutely graded shifts in timbre. And having rendered this idea with such poetry, Schoenberg, being Schoenberg, duly slapped it with a label as clunky as his music was subtle: klangfarbenmelodie, literally, ‘sound-colour melody’.

Apologies: it’s too easy to poke fun at Schoenberg. God knows, writing persuasively about music is impossible without metaphor, and the idea that sounds can equate to colours was particularly apposite in Schoenberg’s fin-de-siècle prime — an era when composers used sonorities like artists covering a canvas, with the symphony orchestra as the grandest of paintboxes.