In this anniversary year of Arnold Schoenberg (born 150 years ago), there are no doubt many performances of his groundbreaking chamber song cycle, Pierrot lunaire around the world. Indeed, one could say it is a fitting work for our crazy times. In Tokyo, the work was performed at Suntory Hall’s Chamber Music Garden festival in a concert that also included works by his near contemporaries Stravinsky, Ravel and Berg. The concert was produced by Berlin-based Japanese pianist Yu Kosuge, a regular collaborator of the CMG, who brought together an outstanding line-up of musicians from both Japan and abroad. She is equally a great soloist and sympathetic chamber music player, and although there were works that didn’t involve the piano at all, one sensed that she was at the heart of the evening’s music-making.
The concert, held in the intimate space of the Blue Rose (Small Hall), started symbolically in the dark with the lights down, an apt way to open a programme about night and madness. Clarinettist Makoto Yoshida performed the first of Stravinsky’s 3 Pieces for Clarinet solo while walking around the aisles. Although one’s ears are more heightened in the dark, it isn’t easy to locate where the sound is coming from, and it was a thrill when he walked right past me and I could hear the warmth of his sound as well as his breath.
This was followed by two songs cycles with chamber ensemble featuring mezzo-soprano Michaela Selinger. In Stravinsky’s Three Songs of William Shakespeare, scored for voice, flute (Jocelyn Aubrun), clarinet (Yoshida), and viola (Mayumi Kanagawa), Selinger captured the mood in each of the Bard’s evocative text: tender in the first song, mysterious in the second, humorous in the third, in which the clarinet imitates a cuckoo and closes with a flourish.
The emotional highlight of the first half was Ravel’s Chansons madécasses, a work that was influenced by Pierrot lunaire. The text, written by the 18th-century French poet Évariste de Parny, is full of the sensuousness of life on this tropical island, but as Ian Bostridge discusses in his recent book Song and Self, this song cycle “exists in a historical matrix that both opposes and is complicit in the European colonial enterprise” and it is not a comfortable listen for us in the 21st century. Indeed, Selinger sang the second song “Aoua! méfiez-vous des blancs” (Ow! Beware of white people) with gripping directness that could still shock us. The first half closed with a trio version of the Adagio from Berg’s Chamber Concerto (which he later arranged for piano, clarinet and violin), a work composed for Schoenberg’s 50th birthday. The movement is in turn lyrical and passionate, and Kosuge led a highly intense and alluring performance.
After such a rich first half, we came to Pierrot lunaire. Selinger, appearing in a boyish black outfit with clownish make-up and red bow ties on her shoes, gave a highly virtuosic and fast-paced performance. Her moon-drunk Pierrot was mercurial but not mad or menacing, flitting between the various characters with ease. Sometimes her Sprechstimme was more “sung”, and other times it was secco and more speechlike, but it was stylish throughout. The five musicians, with some doubling instruments, brought Schoenberg’s kaleidoscopic score to life with virtuosity (the combinations of the instruments change from number to number), but ultimately this was ensemble making of the highest order, and a great tribute to the anniversary composer.
