Chamber Music Northwest review: Sextet proves Schoenberg's ...

Chamber Music Northwest has enjoyed a close partnership with Reed College for coming up on 40 years, and Friday night some of its leading players joined in the school's yearlong centennial celebrations with a brilliant program evoking the musical world of the first graduating class.

The biggest work of the evening was Arnold Schoenberg's hair-raising "Pierrot Lunaire," the semi-spoken, semi-sung and all-surreal 1912 melodrama on poems by the Belgian dramatist Albert Giraud. In a stellar performance, soprano Mary Nessinger and five colleagues -- Jeffrey Swann (piano), Ida Kavafian (violin/viola), Fred Sherry (cello), David Shifrin (clarinets) and Tara Helen O'Connor (flute/piccolo) -- demonstrated that even after a century, the piece has not lost its capacity to unsettle (or to drive listeners from the concert hall; there were at least a half-dozen departures).

Giraud's texts (used by Schoenberg in Erich Hartleben's German translation) involves the clown Pierrot, a stock character of French pantomime, by turns lovestruck, blasphemous, mocking, violent and finally nostalgic. The imagery is arrestingly strange, with "black gigantic butterflies," a bloodied communion wafer, Pierrot smoking through a trepanned skull. The moon hangs over it all (hence "Lunaire"), as do constant hints of death.

Schoenberg set 21 of the poems in Sprechstimme, or "speaking-voice," a hybrid of speech and singing adapted from melodramatic recitation. Murmuring, shrieking, wailing, intoning, Nessinger owned her role with her focused voice, marvelously expressive face and precise gestures. Scarlet lipstick on her whitened face (colors echoed by her outfit) hinted at the verses' often bloody images.

It was CMNW's third performance of "Pierrot" since 1999 with nearly the same musicians (Peter Serkin substituted for Swann once). While a change of personnel might seem like a refreshing idea in the abstract, it was difficult to imagine wanting to hear anyone else do it Friday night, certainly not as soon as Nessinger opened her mouth. The instrumental playing, in Schoenberg's astonishing variety of forms and textures, was rock-solid.

Swann, Kavafian and Sherry's reading of Maurice Ravel's 1914 Trio for Piano, Violin, and Cello was similarly superb. The music is vast, both stylistically and sonically, embracing Ravel's influences, his passion for music of the distant past and his enthusiasm for Asian forms, as well as encompassing virtually the entire range of all three instruments. Swann was masterful in explosive passages with fast notes strewn all over, and Kavafian and Sherry were exemplars of keen ensemble and sterling intonation.
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The evening began with the premiere of Reed professor David Schiff's "Class of 1915," bright, swinging and all-too-brief arrangements of foxtrots and a rag, with a sultry, striding homage to W.C. Handy's "St. Louis Blues" in between. Scored for the same instrumentalists Schoenberg used for "Pierrot," it made for a satisfyingly cohesive program and a worthy tribute to a leading educational institution (which, in the interest of full disclosure, happens to be my alma mater) on its hundredth birthday.

-- James McQuillen

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/performance/index.ssf/2012/02/chamber_music_northwest_review_8.html

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