03 December 2009
Practice makes perfect: Eighth blackbird flies without a safety net: sheet music.
By Doyle Armbrust
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Playing Arnold Schoenberg's 40-minute melodrama Pierrot Lunaire without sheet music seems like a bad dare. But for eighth blackbird, the Herculean task is merely modus operandi—and extremely rare, if not unique, among such groups. "It's like bashing the notes into our skulls with a two-by-four," says eighth blackbird violinist-violist Matt Albert. "But the end result is awesome." Learning Pierrot took 100 hours of group rehearsal, not counting individual practice, plus three weeks of staging.
Memorization has been a revelatory yet daunting practice for Chicago's indomitable new-music group since its New York debut in 1998, when the sextet staged Fred Lerdahl's Fantasy Etudes. (The ensemble moved to Chicago in 2000.) "We basically apologized up front at that first performance," the 35-year-old Albert tells us. "We said it was just a fun experiment."
The ensemble quickly realized that by keeping the music stands offstage, it could engage in score-enhancing movement. "The audience has one fewer barrier, the stands, between them and us," Albert explains. "We can make more eye contact. We can hear better. Plus, we know our own parts so much better."
While it's beyond a stretch to refer to the 1912 work Pierrot Lunaire as "new music," many concertgoers still find Schoenberg's chromaticism and non-narrative poeticism challenging: one of those "barriers" Albert refers to. The descending piano figure wouldn't be out of place in an early-20th-century art song, and the atonal Sprechstimme (speaking voice)—which guest artist Lucy Shelton will sing on Tuesday 8 at the Harris Theater—informs the audience it's embarking on an unfamiliar, decidedly gloomy journey.
With lines such as "Dark, black giant moths / Killed the brightness of the sun," Pierrot is an unmistakable nightmare-scape, even without staging. The imagery of the titular commedia dell'arte clown smoking Turkish tobacco out of a skull, not to mention his beheading by a "gleaming scimitar," the moon, lends itself to the dramatic.
The eighth blackbird members knew just the person to infuse the score with theatricality: New York choreographer-playwright Mark DeChiazza, who worked as assistant director for the ensemble's production last year of singing in the dead of night. "My first response to hearing Pierrotwas panic," DeChiazza says in a video interview on eighth blackbird's website. The anxiety was short-lived, however; DeChiazza made the inspired decision to employ the talents of Metropolitan Opera Ballet dancer Elyssa Dole as a fluttering twin to soprano Shelton and to cast eighth blackbird percussionist Matthew Duvall as the peculiar lead, replete with bow tie and suspenders. The costumes evoke the roaring '20s, with Duvall in a white suit and the women in flapper dresses, set against the muted tones of the musicians' outfits.
The dramatic roles of the roaming instrument wielders fluctuate from song to song. One piece is staged as a waltz between Dole and Duvall, with Albert and flutist Tim Munro cutting in as suitors for the dame's attention. In other tunes, pianist Lisa Kaplan joins Dole in a dance around the piano bench, and cellist Nicholas Photinos escorts Shelton around the stage as she tells a story.
The highly anticipated Chicago premiere reprises the production's debut at California's Ojai Music Festival in June. While Pierrot Lunaire no doubt will further eighth blackbird's reputation for equal parts erudition and panache, the ensemble continues its commitment to casual concertgoers. "The goal of our performances isn't a specific musical meaning that they have to 'get,'" Albert stresses. "It's about an experience that will move them."
Eighth blackbird presents Pierrot Lunaire at Harris Theater Tuesday 8 at 7:30pm.
