The first and second Viennese school is the focus of Karim Said’s third album for Rubicon. The music spans just over a century, but in that time, two composers who changed the course of music – Beethoven and Schoenberg flourished. Schoenberg’s music is no longer ‘modern’. It is over 100 years old. It has influences of jazz and the waltz. Just over a century earlier, Beethoven’s 3rd Symphony, ‘Eroica’ pushed the boundaries of the classical symphony to breaking point and ushered in a new age. Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Variations can still shock and sound a world away from Mozart and his Vienna. In many ways these variations have an affinity with 20th century piano writing. Schoenberg had turned away from late romanticism and large-scale compositions. His works here are extreme in their brevity and concentration, something his greatest pupil Webern was to develop further in his set of extremely dissonant and terse Variations.