09 December 2009
Lucy Shelton and eighth blackbird Present Sufficiently Bizarre "Pierrot"
Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 “Pierrot lunaire” is a morbid work. The 21 poems that comprise its text address a number of cheery topics, from vampiric moths and the regurgitated blood of consumptives, to more light-hearted fare like black masses and how to smoke tobacco out of a skull. (Poem 19 relates a spectacle probably more familiar to modern listeners, that is, a clown playing the viola.)
Lucy Shelton and eighth blackbird Present Sufficiently Bizarre "Pierrot"
by Tim Sawyier
original link
Arnold Schoenberg’s 1912 “Pierrot lunaire” is a morbid work. The 21 poems that comprise its text address a number of cheery topics, from vampiric moths and the regurgitated blood of consumptives, to more light-hearted fare like black masses and how to smoke tobacco out of a skull. (Poem 19 relates a spectacle probably more familiar to modern listeners, that is, a clown playing the viola.)
eighth blackbird’s “Pierrot” at the Harris Theater more than lived up to the work’s intrinsic bizarritude. My jury is still out as to whether or not a barefooted Lucy Shelton done up in teal sequins cozying up to a (superlative) Australian flutist while the latter plays Schoenberg from memory enhanced the performance, or just went too far. I find the piece itself macabre enough as it is, without dressing it up with the bare light bulbs, unexplained ladder, and specious choreography in which eighth blackbird chose to drape it. Don’t get me wrong—it was a sight to be seen! But whether you’re supposed to hear a piece of music, or see it (especially one as iconic as “Pierrot”) is up for debate. Though however you dress it up, if at all, performing the whole thing from memory, and with the precision eighth blackbird did on Tuesday, is a sight to be heard.
The first half of the concert was also a slightly mitigated success. Anyone who has walked into the Harris Theater has no doubt been struck by its streamlined architecture, décor, lighting, etc. Transforming the black box interior of the theater itself into a smoky Weimar cabaret is no small feat, but one that eighth blackbird and Lucy Shelton pulled off. Shelton’s appropriately crass, unapologetic renditions of four Kurt Weill songs almost made you see cheap rouge on her cheeks, and a sensitive rendering of Alban Berg’s trio arrangement of the slow movement of his “Kammerkonzert” was a window into the zeitgeist of Weimar.
All in all, the evening was a thoughtfully constructed presentation of music that has had a profound influence on that of the last 75-100 years. I’m not sure if George Perle’s “Critical Moments 2,” with which eighth blackbird closed the first half, is necessarily the apotheosis of this legacy (its nine “sparse” movements sound about as much the product of an 85-year-old filling a commission as a conscientious compositional choice), but the fact that, as with “Pierrot,” eighth blackbird played the thing from memory more than compensated for the debatable quality of the piece itself. And whatever I have to say, it’s hard to argue with eighth blackbird’s two recent Grammy Awards…
