In recent years, the dazzling violinist who likes to be known as PatKop has taken to appearing as Pierrot, the clown/artist immortalised in Schoenberg’s suite of melodramas, Pierrot lunaire. Sadly, the identity of Pierrot that Patricia Kopatchinskaja presented to a packed audience in the Purcell Room struck me more as Pierrot lunatique. It was a presentation that started well enough – PatKop plucking at her violin which momentarily became a chin-held mandolin – but soon lost its way in the fog that enveloped the stage.
PatKop gave us a surrealist psycho-space, sporting an over-fussy concoction of suspended props: knotted drapery, small occasional tables, faded tailcoats and a noose. The tightly-packed instrumental layout was festooned with scrunched-up newspaper, which looked like a scene from Terry Gilliam’s cult film Brazil. Into that space, PatKop and her friends fumbled their way through the complex narrative of Schoenberg’s work, sometimes almost tripping over each other, sometimes showing us “acting” that bordered on absurdity. In Enthauptung, Pierrot hangs himself with a noose that was not attached to anything, even though there was already a noose dangling from the ceiling.
Added to the production, to extend to an hour the meagre 35 minutes that Schoenberg allots to Pierrot, was an unusual collection of musical characters. There was a Presto for piano, by CPE Bach (from Wq. 114, arranged by PatKop), Berio’s Lied for solo clarinet, the Jeu from Milhaud’s Suite, Op.157b, as well as three pieces by PatKop herself – FlügelnWund for violin & 8 loudspeakers, a Violin improvisation and excerpts from Ghiribizzi (Whims). On paper they looked like daring interpolations, but in performance they disrupted and confused the elegant three-part structure that Schoenberg so carefully laid out for his masterpiece.
Throughout this misconceived presentation there were, however, moments of real artistry to savour. The accompanying ensemble – Meesun Hong Coleman (violin), Thomas Kaufmann (cello), Júlia Gállego (flute), Reto Bieri (clarinet), and Joonas Ahonen (piano) – showed a well-developed understanding of Schoenberg’s score. Their playing of Valse de Chopin and Enthauptung was full of flair. Gállego’s solo was a perfect companion to Pierrot in Der kranke Mond, and Bieri was an attentive listener to Gebet an Pierrot. The brilliant piano writing for Die Kreuze elicited a bravura response from Ahonen. In Serenade, Kaufmann clearly enjoyed using his metaphorical outsized bow on the pate of the equally metaphorical Sir Baldy! As for Coleman, her touch and movement on both violin and viola, were knowing stylish gestures.
PatKop’s best moments came when she took up the violin; the excerpts from Ghiribizzi were full of vigour and menace, and for the Milhaud her duet with Bieri was truly delightful. But those moments lasted less than ten minutes. For the rest of the time she laboured through the delivery of Albert Giraud’s poems, as translated by Otto Hartleben. It is difficult to describe her mode of recitation with any accuracy; perhaps it was the straining after a kind of hyper-sensitivity of expression which stretched the Sprechgesang almost to breaking point. She certainly cannot be faulted on effort.
It is fashionable to “re-think” and “re-imagine” classic works and I fancy that this production may have been conceived as a postmodern take on a key marker of musical modernism. Whatever the motivation it was not one of PatKop’s finest hours.
