Mavra and Pierrot lunaire, Royal Opera, 17 May 2022

Linbury Studio Theatre

Parasha – April Koyejo-Audiger
Hussar, Mavra – Egor Zhuravskii
Mother – Sarah Pring
Neighbour – Idunnu Münch
Pierrot – Alexandra Lowe

Anthony Almeida (director)
Rosanna Vize (designs)

Lucy Carter, Alan Mooney (lighting)
Anjali Mehra (movement)

Britten Sinfonia

Michael Papadopoulos (conductor)

Images: Helen Murray / ROH

The Royal Opera’s Young Artists Programme celebrates twenty years with a Linbury double-bill of Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Mavra and Pierrot lunaire. It is an odd combination: one of Stravinsky’s less-loved works, a very short opera, with a cabaret melodrama that is no opera, yet is probably its composer’s single most celebrated work. If one tried hard enough, one could doubtless fathom a tenuous connection, but then one could probably do so between anything. Director Anthony Almeida, then, is probably right to have left his guiding thread at little more than surface level, concentrating instead on presentation of two unequal halves. 

All too readily underestimated, Mavra, here given in a chamber arrangement by Paul Phillips, is in many ways emphatically a Russian work. If aspects of Stravinsky’s very particular sound world are necessarily lost—it was not solely on account of where I was seated that my experience was piano-heavy—an imaginative realisation, alluding consciously or otherwise to scores such as The Soldier’s Tale, presents other possibilities. Pushkin, in any case, seems unusually apparent, even, perhaps especially, in a staging that emphasises the formalism of something akin to face. Stravinsky always revels in patterns, in allusion, in parody, and in disjuncture: this has it all, musically and scenically. Colour and ‘look’ are to the fore, part of a surface that may or may not preclude discovery of anything beneath. The drag transformation of officer Vasily into maid Mavra amounts in a Warhol-like way to something, despite its essential nothingness. Is that, perhaps what a host of bin bags tell us? It also engineers a connection of sorts to Pierrot, where Almeida has a woman by contrast turn period androgyne. Indoors becomes outdoors; lighting becomes both alternative lighting (moon) and pitch blackness. Reappearance of Mavra’s cast seemed to me a little more forced, the sign interpreter more animated. Pierrot’s presence early on in in Mavra added little other than mild confusion, at least for me. Thought had been given, though, to an attempt to combine; that was enough, really. 

Michael Papadopoulos, members of the Britten Sinfonia, and an able, alert cast captured well the knowing devices of Stravinsky’s score. It twists and turns, so long as one listens, and provides a splendid counterpoise—it certainly did here—to stage action that continues to surprise in its entirely unsurprising course. April Koyejo-Audiger reminded us, throughout, that whatever the games Stravinsky may have been playing, a Russian heart beat, sometimes irregularly, always metrically, beneath. Egor Zhuravskii offered dislocated bel canto contrast and complement. Sarah Pring and Idunnu Münch navigated with wit the fine line between stock characters and their light deconstruction, Glinka and the 1920s. If there were times when I missed the full instrumentation, the youth of this eternally young work nonetheless shone through. 

Stravinsky must surely rank as one of Pierrot’s most quoted admirers. ‘The solar plexus as well as the mind of twentieth-century music,’ he called it, hailing on another occasion the ‘instrumental substance’ that had ‘impressed me immensely. And by saying “instrumental”, I mean not simply the instrumentation of this music but the whole contrapuntal and polyphonic structure of this brilliant masterpiece’. That came through, clearly, in a performance whose lines, reciter’s included, were supremely well balanced, wandering in tonality as in character. A touch more expressionism might not have gone amiss, but there are many worse things than a somewhat classicising Pierrot. Given its all-encompassing yet contradictory nature, the work doubtless resists a ‘complete’, let alone ‘ideal’, performance. It was nonetheless difficult to imagine Alexandra Lowe’s personal combination of speech, pitch, and gesture being readily improved upon.

If Pierrot took a slightly Stravinskian turn, what could be more contextually appropriate? Not that there was not darkness too, likewise catastrophe and sheer weirdness, but the balance had shifted. There will be other Pierrots, other attempts, as Beckett had it, to ‘fail better’, but this will have made new converts, who, like the rest of us, should prepare to be surprised once again by this ever-surprising chameleon of a work.

Manning/Bernstein/Portugheis, et al. - Zemlinsky, Dallapiccola, Nono, Gerhard, and Schoenberg, 4 March 2014

Hall One, Kings Place

Zemlinsky – Three Pieces, for cello and piano

Dallapiccola – Ciaccona, Intermezzo, and Adagio
Nono – ¿Donde estás, hermano?
Gerhard – Dances from Don Quixote
Schoenberg – Pierrot lunaire, op.21

Jane Manning (reciter)

Marie Jaermann, Seljan Nasibili (sopranos)
Katie Coventry (mezzo-soprano)
Anna Migalios (contralto)
Benjamin Baker (violin/viola)
Rohan de Saram (cello)
Susan Milan (flute/piccolo)
David Campbell (clarinets)
Julian Jacobson, Alberto Portugheis (piano)
Giora Bernstein (conductor)

 

With Schoenberg, I tend to take every opportunity I can – at least since my first visit to the Salzburg Festival, when understandably I chose to see Figaro over Boulez conducting Moses und Aron, though I have rued the loss ever since. Whether that be a matter of travelling to Leipzig to see the brilliant triple-bill of Schoenberg’s one-act operas, ‘Moderne Menschen’, or missing out on Leif Ove Andsnes playing Beethoven a couple of miles away at the Barbican, Schoenberg tends to exert a special call. Whether I should have been better off ignoring the call on this occasion remains unclear. Certainly if the standard of the first half of the concert had been repeated in the second, I should have been far better off staying at home. But then a good Pierrot lunaire more or less managed to save the day.

 

Jane Manning remains a force of nature, having given her first broadcast performance with Pierrot almost fifty years ago, in 1965. No one is ever likely to agree – even with his or her own thoughts, let alone anyone else’s – about how this work ‘should’ be performed. It is far better to allow that different performers bring different qualities to it on different occasions. If truth be told, Manning was probably wise to downplay the sung element in her recitation. The moments, relatively few, when she moved towards song suggested, not surprisingly, a voice that had known better days. And yet, her vast experience – not just of this, but of more than 350 (!) world premieres, a good number of which would have taken inspiration from Schoenberg in one way or another – shone through nevertheless. The words and their possibilities she clearly knew backwards. (Now there is an idea for another Pierrot-ensemble piece.) She knew, in a way composers such as Luigi Nono or Helmut Lachenmann would surely have appreciated, how to make the most of vowels, consonants, the journeys between them. Above all, she appreciated and communicated the strong element of cabaret. Manning’s was in every sense a performance, and all the better for it.

 

Not, of course, that the reciter is all there is to Pierrot, far from it. Giora Bernstein led a highly musical account from an excellent bunch of players. Perhaps balance was tilted a little too much away from the ensemble, but we have a host of other performances in which we can savour still more strongly what Stravinsky quite rightly considered an instrumental masterpiece. There were virtues aplenty, nevertheless. The passacaglia registered as such as strongly as I can recall, Night eventually obscuring in more than one sense. Dance rhythms made their Viennese impressions without exaggeration, the ‘Heimfahrt’ an especially fine example. Benjamin Baker’s violin and viola playing was perhaps particularly impressive, perfectly attuned to shifting mood and context, but the ensemble as a whole, including Julian Jacobson’s piano, such a relief after the first half, had no weak links.

 

As for that first half, well… Doubtless Alberto Portugheis’s heart was in the right place. The concert seems to have been his project; he was listed as ‘curator’. But sadly, it marked a triumph of ambition over even rudimentary technical ability; this was piano-playing that would have disgraced many an amateur performance, and may well have been the worst I have heard in a professional context. The opening Zemlinsky’s 1891 Three Pieces for cello and piano would most likely have done the composer no favours in a stronger account. Apparently rediscovered recently by Raphael Wallfisch – I am placing my trust in a programme note which, in many respects, proved otherwise highly fallible – they are at best apprentice works, straining towards, yet never coming remotely close to Brahms. Here, Portugheis and, much to my surprise, Rohan de Saram sounded as if they were sight-reading. There was little or no sense of musical collaboration; indeed, the players fell noticeably out of sync on more than one occasion. De Saram fared better in Dallapiccola’s Ciaccona, Intermezzo, and Adagio, though even when playing solo, it took him a while to get into his stride, the chaconne initially hesitant. At least, though, the performance offered some sense of the stature of the piece, its dodecaphonic lyricism and structural integrity a wonderful introduction to this appallingly neglected composer.

 

Nono’s ¿Donde estás, hermano? was provoked – the composer spoke of his need for such a ‘provocation’ to compose, to bear witness – by the ‘disappearances’ in Argentina. The music comes from Quando stanno morendo, Diario Polacco, no.2, but here without electronics. (Not that one would have known from the programme, which bathetically informed us that Nono had ‘strongly-held political views’.) The vocal quartet – Marie Jaermann, Seljan Nasibili, Katie Coventry, and Anna Migalios – seemed excellent. Alas, their performance was compromised by Portugheis’s insistence on conducting; they would surely have better off without. Plodding and without technique, Portugheis’s contribution was summed up by his score falling off the music stand towards the end. As for his solo rendition of Gerhard’s Don Quixote dances, the first opened quite strongly. At last, I thought, we might hear something from him equating to a real performance. I should not have tempted fate. Much of the rest sounded closer to a bumbling amateur’s initial read-through. From time to time, some sense of rhythm or pulse emerged, only roundly to be defeated.

 

Sadly, then, I was reminded of Boulez’s observation about the self-defeating nature of the occasional performances of music by the Second Viennese School in his youth. The technical standard had been so poor that they did more harm than good, an incitement to him to mount his own performances, leading to the foundation of the Domaine musical. If only, if only…

 

Puccini, Schoenberg, Dallapiccola

I find myself in the middle of writing a chapter on Dallapiccola, focused on Il prigioniero. Now is not the time to give too much away - for one thing, my thoughts tend very much to emerge through the act of writing, so I do not yet really know what I am going to say - but a letter of 9 September 1949, which Dallapiccola wrote to Schoenberg, rather touched me. Dallapiccola is recalling the 1924 Italian premiere of Pierrot lunaire, which Schoenberg conducted at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. It was that performance, Dallapiccola, would later recall, which made the young musician, studying at the Florence Conservatory, resolve to concentrate his energies upon composition. Puccini, as is well known, made the journey to hear Schoenberg's work too. Whilst many laughed, he listened intently throughout, and afterwards asked Alfredo Casella, whose Corporazione della Nuove Musiche had organised the concert, to introduce him to Schoenberg, who would relate how moved he was by the presence of that 'great man'. Dallapiccola, a quarter of a century later, recalled:

I had seen you in Florence at the time of the first Italian tour of Pierrot lunaire, but how could I, a Conservatory student, find the courage on that evening to come and shake your hand? In any case, I have never forgotten the attitude of Puccini with regard to you on that 1 April 1924, and since that evening I have considered the popular Italian composer to be of an intelligence and a humanity that I had not suspected.
 

On the centenary of Pierrot lunaire...

... or rather of its first public performance, on 16 October 1912. Is there any work that stands so proudly before the music of the twentieth century and pushes the Romanticism of the previous century to its extreme and beyond? Not even The Rite of Spring, whatever its musical greatness and the quasi-legendary nature of its premiere the following year. If too often today performances of Stravinsky's masterpiece have been neutralised, the Rite degraded into an orchestral showpiece, then Pierrot seems, like so much of Schoenberg's œuvre, still, in an almost Adornian sense, to resist. The very notion of adequacy in performance seems misplaced. It seems impossible even to agree upon how its Sprechstimme should be 'voiced'. The very make-up of its instrumental ensemble is prophetic of so much 'New Music' to come. Can one imagine Le marteau sans maître without Pierrot? More to the point, could Boulez have done? Peter Maxwell Davies's Pierrot Players, later the Fires of London, took Schoenberg's quintet as its core. Hans Werner Henze's Der langwierige Weg in die Wohnung der Natascha Ungeheuer took the same ensemble as its emobdiment of sickly, bourgeois expressionism - and, almost despite itself, despite the composer's intentions, ended up offering to the Pierrot-ensemble the most compelling music. Stravinsky, who could in equal measure hit musical nails squarely on the head and prove himself grotesquely wrong-headed, came perhaps closer to the truth than anyone else when he celebratedly described Pierrot as  'the solar plexus as well as the mind of early-twentieth-century music'. We might simply delete the 'early'. And so, in tribute to that performance in Berlin's Choralian-Saal from Albertine Zehme as reciter, Eduard Steuermann, Jakob Masiniak, Hans Kindler, Hans de Vries, and Karl Eßberger, here are the score and one of the great recorded performances of the Dreimal sieben Gedichte, from Boulez, the Ensemble Intercontemporain, and Christine Schäfer:

Collett/Theseus Ensemble/Paterson - Benjamin and Boulez, 14 February 2011

Linbury Studio Theatre, Royal Opera House

Benjamin – Upon Silence
Boulez – Le marteau sans maître

Louise Collett (mezzo-soprano)
Theseus Ensemble
Geoffrey Paterson (conductor)


Whilst posters around town regaled us with the uninviting promise of ‘Valentine’s Day Romantic Classics’ and the like – who actually goes to these concerts? – the Theseus Ensemble and its founder Geoffrey Paterson presented something far more interesting. If that sounds like faint praise, it was certainly not meant as such, for any ensemble, let alone one that has been in existence for less than a year, which performs Le marteau sans maître deserves praise most fulsome, especially when presented as well as it was here.

First on the menu, however, was George Benjamin’s Upon Silence. Written for the viol consort, Fretwork, in 1990, Benjamin arranged it for seven strings (two violas, three cellos, and two double basses) the following year. As Paterson pointed out in his programme note, ‘with astonishing imagination and skill, Benjamin managed to retain the distinctive qualities of the original’. Vibrato is forbidden, save for certain instances, when it really tells; moreover, the players perform throughout with wooden mutes. The febrile, glassy string tone with which the performance opened contrasted with and yet complemented the more muted – in more than one sense – general timbre. Mezzo-soprano Louise Collett delivered Yeats’s words (from Long-legged fly) with great clarity of line and diction. One might characterise the vocal writing as restrainedly melismatic, recognisably that of the composer of Into the Little Hill. The refrain, ‘Like a long-legged fly upon the stream / His/Her mind moves upon silence’, seemed both to impart and to transform the work’s form. The second stanza, dealing with Helen of Troy, ends in ‘silence’ accompanied and succeeded by a plaintive cello line, which one could well have imagined actually was a viol. By contrast, the end of the third and final stanza, that of Michelangelo, presented rich cello vibrato, truly striking and liberating, likewise the ensuing string harmonics, building to an ecstatic climax, subsiding, then preparing the way for the final, questing and questioning vocal crescendo upon the final ‘silence’.

As in November’s Theseus Ensemble concert, Paterson also provided an illustrated introduction, on this occasion only to Le marteau sans maître. It was succinct but telling, providing an excellent ‘way in’ for audience members who might have been daunted by Boulez’s 1953-5 masterpiece and, even for those of us who fancy we know the work a little better, providing an important key not only to the work but also to the performance. The ensemble’s stated mission is, ‘with thoughtful programming and approachable presentation, … to illuminate the sometimes forbiddingly labyrinthine complexities’ of ‘challenging works of the later 20th and 21st centuries’. It certainly scored upon programming and presentation here. Paterson described and the players performed three types of music, corresponding to the three poems, L’artisanat furieux, Bourreaux de solitude, and Bel édifice et les pressentiments. The first was characterised as ‘making’, the craftsmanship of the poem’s title, not ‘furious’ until the performance, since we heard it slowed down; the second had a ticking, clock-like pulse; finally, the third, corresponding to the more human imagery of the verse, was more temperamental, rhetorical, gestural, and passionate. (Far more passionate, one might say, than the greetings card culture awaiting us outside.) The tale of the piece was to be how the three types of material interacted, preparing the way for final disintegration.

That, I think, was very much what we heard, amongst other things of course. What also struck me was the dialectic between similarity and dissimilarity concerning a work that equally defined so much of the first half of the twentieth century, Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire. The ensemble is not identical, of course, though a number of works would take as their cue that fabled Pierrot ensemble, but there are points of reference – flute, albeit alto flute, and viola – as well as the percussion instruments very much of Boulez’s own time and presaging what was to come. The singer: well, she sings rather than speaks, but recall Boulez’s notorious, beautifully ‘sung’ recording with Yvonne Minton. There were times when, not unreasonably, Collett seemed a little uncomfortable, but she was clearly suffering from a cough; if her pronunciation was not always perfect, once again, one could hear every word, and her intonation was generally excellent too. Paterson ensured early contrast between the different types of material; the contrast between the first two movements was admirably clear, that of the first commentary on Bourreaux de solitude sounding almost like an exoticised, Webernised, Ravel (Stravinsky’s ‘Swiss watchmaker’), or to put it another way, sounding precisely like what it was, namely Boulez. If tension flagged slightly part way through this movement, it was a minor blemish, for all players evidently gave their best throughout, and it showed. Invidious though it may be to single out any one member of the ensemble, I feel I must mention Matthew Kettle’s valiant and successful struggle with Boulez’s well-nigh impossible viola part. (Click here for an interview in which the conductor and I discussed the work beforehand).

The second commentary showed how even when one might fancy the music to be pointillistic, it is connections that count: this is not Stockhausen. I especially liked the way the closing triangle note was left to resonate: a nice touch of detail and expression. When it came to Bourreaux de solitude itself – two of the three commentaries precede the verse itself – one could still hear the ticking, albeit slower and perhaps more luxuriant, if one can conceive of luxuriant ticking. (The phrase almost sounds as though it might have come from René Char!) Its interaction with the other varieties of material became increasingly marked, so that, during the third commentary, we could readily hear, well primed as we were, its subversion of craftsmanship and rhetoric, and the other way(s) around too. Breakdown under the strain of such intricate interrelationship thus came as an expressive and intellectual necessity during the ninth and final movement, the double of Bel édifice et les pressentiments. Was Pierrot perhaps our uninvited guest to the disintegrating feast? Gongs and alto flute opened up a void at the end, both ominous and inviting.

Pierrot Lunaire, Transition_Projects, 11 December 2009

Hall One, Kings Place

Emma Williams (flute/piccolo)
Peter Sparks (clarinet/bass clarinet)
Tom Hankey (violin/viola)
Oliver Coates (violoncello)
Alasdair Beaton (piano)

Claire Booth (soprano)
Netia Jones (director/video design)
Ryan Wigglesworth (conductor)

This performance of Pierrot Lunaire was part of a Kings Place series from Transition_projects. The programming has been fascinating, for instance mixing Dowland and Stravinsky, and Bartók with his countrymen, the choreographer Rudolf Laban, and the photographer László Moholy-Nagy. Claire Booth, the soloist in this concert, had also sung in Couperin’s Leçons de Ténèbres, and would the following evening sing in Scarlatti’s Correa nel seno amato. Unifying these and other concerts was the theme of ‘Darkness and Light’: a spur to imagination, it would seem, rather than an arbitrary constriction, but most welcome if such an interesting range of music proves to be the result. I only wish that I had been able to attend more of the performances.

The present production had first been presented at Wilton’s Music Hall in October 2007. It seems that the praise garnered then was very much deserved. Most importantly, this was a performance that raised questions, rather than answered them. Booth’s excellent performance might well be considered relatively restrained, but hysterical cabaret, though it can work, is not the only way to perform what Stravinsky rightly judged an instrumental masterpiece. Sprechstimme is impossible to define, but it certainly sounded as if it were on offer here; only the occasional note was sung, but pitch was far from incidental. And the words were crystal-clear. Titles, an integral part of Netia Jones’s video design, helped, yet the German was so clear that many would have understood anyway. Moreover, though there was ample opportunity to hear Booth’s words and notes, her part also drew attention to the teeming instrumental invention of Schoenberg’s score, here flawlessly and atmospherically delivered by the players of the Transition_ensemble. Great demands are placed upon the instrumentalists, but technical issues had been thoroughly subordinated to musical demands. Ryan Wigglesworth’s direction was always sure of its direction, imparting a strong sense of unity to what, in lesser hands, can sometimes seem just a succession of poems.

Jones speaks sensibly of her role in this. Pierrot ‘is a highly theatrical work already,’ so her production concentrates upon helping ‘a listener navigate through its treacherous narrative’. One might consider that hardly necessary, but the visual scenes did no harm and heightened that sense of playfulness the director rightly sees as a crucial element to the work. Manipulated, monochrome moving images, of Booth (in ‘real time’ and pre-recorded), of architecture, the moon, the Cross, and so forth, provided a backdrop to the crucial musical events unfolding. I was less sure about the beheading: surely it is a little more than whimsical. But the music, rather than the bizarre verse, is truly the thing – and so it was here.

La voix humaine and Pierrot lunaire, Oper Leipzig, 28 September 2008

(Images copyright: Andreas Birkigt)

Leipzig Opera House

La voix humaine
A woman – Angeles Blancas

Christoph Meyer (director)
Ramon Ivars (designs, costumes)
Albert Faura (lighting)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Josep Vicent (conductor)

Pierrot lunaire

A woman who spends too much time on the telephone – Young-Hee Kim

Peter Konwitschny (director)
Michaela Mayer-Michnay (costume collaboration)

Members of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra (Julius Bekesch – violin, Dorothea Hemken – viola, Daniel Pfister – ’cello, Manfred Ludwig – flute/piccolo, Volker Hemken (clarinet/bass clarinet)
Johannes Harneit (conductor)

Oper Leipzig is certainly giving Schoenberg his due. One ought to be able to say that about every opera company, every orchestra, every concert hall in the world, but sadly not. Last season we were treated – yes, treated – to a triple-bill of Schoenberg’s three one-act operas. Now we have a staged version of Pierrot Lunaire in a double-bill with Poulenc’s one-act opera, La voix humaine. I should readily wager that these two works have rarely if ever been performed together, Poulenc’s admiration for the Second Viennese School and even for the young Boulez notwithstanding. There is, if the truth be told, little to unite the two works, although as staged here, Pierrot might be said, like La voix humaine, to have a female protagonist. Aside from the strange description of the former work’s reciter as ‘a woman who spends too much time on the telephone’ and a brief re-appearance of the telephone from La voix humaine, in which re-appearance its wire acted as a noose, there was little to unite the productions either. This did not matter; we simply experienced the two works – or perhaps better Poulenc’s work and Peter Konwitschny’s take on Schoenberg’s work – on more or less their own terms.

In Christoph Meyer’s production, first seen at Barcelona’s Gran Teatre del Liceu, the setting for La voix humaine was simple and much as originally envisaged. We saw a woman at home in the aftermath of what we learned had been a suicide attempt; home gave an impression of something credibly Parisian; the telephone was there too. And so, rightly, the emphasis was upon Angelas Blancas, whom Meyer directed with impeccable realism. Unless one were utterly to overturn the premise of the work, I cannot imagine a symbolic production working. Blancas’s movements, expressions, actions: all seemed utterly believable. This, though, would have been as nothing without her singing. When I say that Blancas proved herself a fine singing actress, I do not mean to imply, as can sometimes be the case, that her acting compensated for her singing, simply to say that the two aspects were as one. Her portrayal of a woman’s last, increasingly desperate telephone call to the lover who has jilted her was not only moving but credible as half – or rather more than that – of a several-times interrupted dialogue. Her looks and vocal timbre also made one quite ready to believe that this was a Parisienne: more full-blooded than the work’s creator, Denise Duval, but none the worse for that. After all, La voix humaine has attracted artists as different as Felicity Lott, Elisabeth Soderström, and Jessye Norman. Blancas was quite at home in such august company. She was helped by Josep Vicent’s conducting of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. That the length of the significant pauses did not bring attention to itself is a considerable tribute, since these are difficult to judge. Occasionally I wondered whether the contrast between Stravinskian rhythm and sensual sweetness might have been greater but to have underlined this might well have been too great a disruption. The orchestra sounded warm and well-blended, at home in Poulenc’s music without sacrificing its unmistakeably German timbre. This was undoubtedly a fine performance.

So was that of Pierrot lunaire. Peter Konwitschny contributed an interesting if enigmatic note, although I was not at all sure how it related to what we saw on stage. He claimed rightly: ‘this production is not about the work itself.’ However, I did not readily comprehend how it lent the work ‘expression by giving it back its context’. Rather it seemed to me to impart a narrative or at least scenes, which ‘worked’, even if it was difficult to explain why, or how they connected with the music. As if Young-Hee Kim did not have enough to worry about, she was called upon to arrive drunkenly on stage, interact with the conductor and players, show us that she was – as Alan Bennett might say – ‘in a bit of a state’, shoot herself, and eventually perhaps – as Bennett might also say – ‘pull herself together’. For instance, at the end of the ‘Valse de Chopin’, she snatched the baton from Johannes Harneit’s hands, ran around conducting (and continuing to recite), then stabbed pianist, Christian Hornef with the baton and shouted of his death. Hornef had to lie dead on the floor for a little time until rising to continue with the re-entry of the piano at the end of the following number, ‘Madonna’. In principle, I have reservations about such a staged approach, since it most likely restricts the workings of one’s imagination, but it turned out rather well and is after all but one attempt to present this irreducible, irrepressible, irresistible work.

Kim’s performance was undoubtedly that of a singing – and speaking and various things-in-between... – actress. She varied the ever-shifting balance according to the needs of the performance, which is as it should be, and showed herself attentive to the bizarre words, producing so many different sounds in a single line – ‘So modern sentimental geworden! – of ‘Heimweh’. Harneit, sometimes called upon to act too, directed members of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra with great aplomb. He struck a fine balance – there can surely be no one correct balance – between precision and expression, Romanticism and modernism, decadence and construction. Nightmarish dance rhythms really told.

Most important, Harneit allowed the players room to perform, both as soloists and as members of the ensemble – and of course, with Young-Hee Kim. They also had to speak – reciting the final ‘Rote, fürstliche Rubine’ of the tenth number. Manfred Ludwig switched artfully between flute and piccolo, always ensuring that the latter was an instrument of musical expression, never merely shrill. Hornef displayed a commendable grasp of Schoenberg’s piano style, virtuosic and idiomatic throughout. I was greatly impressed by the combination of shrieking hysteria from both Kim and Volker Hemken’s clarinet in ‘Rote Messe. They cleverly mirrored one another, producing chamber music, not simply effect. As Stravinsky once remarked, Pierrot is – amongst so many other things – an instrumental masterpiece. This was equally apparent in the Romanticism we heard from Daniel Pfister’s ’cello in ‘Serenade’, a performance whose equally audible constructivism also pointed the way forward to the Op.24 Serenade. We had a violinist and a violist, which makes sense, since few players have equal command of both instruments. Julius Bekesch showed himself adept at following – and leading – the ever-shifting moods of this nightmare; a particular highlight was his sweetness of tone in ‘Heimfahrt’, married as always to perfect rhythmical precision. Dorothea Hemken’s rich viola contributed with Hornef’s neo-Brahmsian piano part to the impression in the final ‘O alter Duft’ of a perverted, distorted Lied. It then remained for our heroine (?) to bid us farewell, a modern wayfarer of sorts. I doubt that I shall forget this performance.