10 December 2009
Blackbirds light up the night with their intriguing new take on 'Pierrot Lunaire'
Now in its third season of residence at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, the Chicago-based new music sextet eighth blackbird is presenting its most ambitious season to date. The public is picking up on its vibe. The capital-letter-free ensemble proved as much Tuesday night when it gave an incisive account of Arnold Schoenberg's atonal masterpiece from 1912, "Pierrot Lunaire," before an eager and attentive audience.
Blackbirds light up the night with their intriguing new take on 'Pierrot Lunaire'
by John von Rhein
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Now in its third season of residence at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, the Chicago-based new music sextet eighth blackbird is presenting its most ambitious season to date. The public is picking up on its vibe. The capital-letter-free ensemble proved as much Tuesday night when it gave an incisive account of Arnold Schoenberg's atonal masterpiece from 1912, "Pierrot Lunaire," before an eager and attentive audience.
One of the seminal works of the early 20th century, Schoenberg's setting of poems by the Belgian symbolist writer Albert Giraud came out of the Berlin cabaret tradition. He composed the solo part in Sprechstimme style, half sung and half spoken, which heightens the sense of queasy expressionist fantasy. It's one of those pieces that still seems as weird and disturbing as it must have seemed when new.
Mark DeChiazza's fluid staging, set on a mostly bare stage hung with light bulbs on ropes, added its own layer of surreal ambiguity. A dancer, Elyssa Dole, interacted with the reciter, soprano Lucy Shelton, and both women interacted with the musicians as they moved around the space, performing the intricate score from memory, as did Shelton. The definitive "Pierrot" reciter of our generation, Shelton nailed her mime gestures as superbly as she nailed the score's jagged intervals.
Works by composers either contemporary to Schoenberg (Weill and Berg) or influenced by him (George Perle) shared the program.
The blackbirds will be in residence at the Music Institute of Chicago on Saturday and will return to the Harris Theater for concerts Jan. 16 (a Contempo event) and March 24 (Chicago premiere of Steven Mackey's evening-long "Slide").
