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CHAMBER MUSIC REVIEW
February 12, 2006
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By Anna Carol Dudley
San Francisco State's Morrison Series continued its 50-year run of
free high-quality innovative chamber music concerts by presenting
eighth blackbird Sunday afternoon. The splendid new music group
brought its "noble accents and lucid, inescapable rhythms" to bear on
a stunning performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot
lunaire.
The quotation is from Wallace Stevens' poem,
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," verse eight.
Pierrot lunaire is a melodrama — poetry recited to
music, a form which came into vogue late in the 18th century. The
magnificent recitalist was guest soprano Lucy Shelton. Those of us
who have performed Pierrot in concert could only
stand in awe of this performance, presented as a "Cabaret Opera" and
done entirely from memory by all concerned. The staging was directed
and designed by puppeteer Blair Thomas, and the title role was played
by a life-sized puppet wonderfully brought to life by attendant animators.
Pierrot lunaire is a setting of 21 poems by Albert
Giraud, translated into German by Otto Erich Hartleben. The poems are
grouped into three parts, or "acts," of seven poems each. Pierrot
inhabits many of them, as does the moon — hence the title. He is
occasionally joined by other Commedia dell'arte
characters; the use of puppets is a natural effect since Pierrot and
his colleagues were staples of French puppet theatre in times gone by.
The first act starts with "Mondestrunken" (Moondrunk), in which the
poet drinks poetry from the moon; introduces Pierrot in "The Dandy";
moves to a Chopin Waltz, in which the narrator dances with the puppet;
and winds down with a sick moon. The second act opens with "Nacht"
(Night) and a plea to Pierrot to bring laughter back into a dark
world. It goes on to images of blood and sacrifice, a hanging and a
beheading (in this production, a hand is cut off rather than a whole
head), and ends with more musings on poetry. The third starts with
"Heimweh" (Nostalgia), a sweetly plaintive poem after all that trauma, then goes on to some rather sick tricks Pierrot plays on Cassander:
boring into Cassander's skull and filling it with Turkish tobacco for
his pipe, then fiddling with a bow on Cassander's bald head.
Cassander
seems to have been played by a small Pierrot-like puppet. His scenes
might have more dramatic impact if he were larger and more
differentiated in character. Pierrot, as always skillfully
manipulated by white-clad handlers, walks in the evening and is
disturbed to find a fleck of moonlight on his jacket. A length of red
cloth serves as a skirt and then becomes a boat to carry Pierrot home
to Bergamo ("Heimfahrt" — going home). And Shelton, joined by all
five players, gives beautiful utterance to the final poem, "O alter
Duft" (the old perfumes).
 Pierrot lunaire
Shelton was a fabulous reciter. Schoenberg calls the part
"Sprechstimme" (speaking voice) and in the score it is marked
"Rezitation." It is written in exact rhythms, and the notes are given
pitches but are meant to be spoken, not sung (with a few fleeting
exceptions). So what is the speaker to do when the note she is
looking at is to be held for a full half note? Sustaining a note is
singing. Shelton dealt with this paradox magnificently, her
speaking voice rising and falling through a great range of pitches,
and the held notes sometimes falling away (which can become a cliché
in this piece) but often rising imperceptibly instead, depending on
the word. Schoenberg gives many dynamic indications, and Shelton made
dramatic use of dynamics and vocal colors — sometimes warm, sometimes
hysterical, sometimes gravelly. My one concern about her performance
was that she didn't fully exploit the sounds of the German language,
either because she doesn't relish it or because the staging was a
distraction.
Blair Thomas costumed her wonderfully, with a skirt dark in front and
extravagantly red and full in back. Her face was done in
Commedia clown white and her hair pulled up in an
improbable top-knot. She moved beautifully, still or rushing about,
dancing with Pierrot, crawling across the floor, sitting at a desk
writing poetry. or declaiming from a table-top.
And the players! Flutist Molly Alicia Barth, clarinettist Michael
Maccaferri, violin/viola Matt Albert, cellist Nicholas Photinos, and
pianist Lisa Kaplan all played this complex score superbly, in
perfect ensemble, from memory, moving about the stage clothed in
fantastic costumes all in white with fabulous hats. Schoenberg set
individual poems for one to five players; the first scored for all
five is halfway through Act 2. In this production, only the pianist
stays in the same place. The other players, three of them usually
standing, use the whole stage, sometimes widely apart from each other.
Whoever isn't playing is often occupied with action and props.
Before this, the concert began with a performance of Jacob Druckman's piece for marimba, Reflections on the Nature of Water. Percussionist Matthew Duvall, the sixth blackbird to play from memory, drew beautifully nuanced sounds from his instrument — an impressive tour de force. His playing was also accompanied by puppetry. Two puppets entered, each carried by three giant white-clad figures on stilts. A story was enacted to go with the music. Puppet A repelled the friendly advances of Puppet B, who tired of hanging about and fell into the water. Puppet A dived in to rescue Puppet B. B survived, but A drowned then was shrouded in white and transported to puppet heaven. All this took a long time, in slow motion, because it is a long piece. The puppetry did not upstage the magnificent playing of Duvall. Rumor has it that the six puppet-bearers on stilts were the five other blackbirds plus Thomas. And I suppose Duvall made his contribution as a supernumerary in Pierrot. A large and appreciative audience filled McKenna Hall. I got the impression that people felt that they had heard and seen a remarkable performance, but many were somewhat puzzled by it. For Pierrot lunaire, large banners were unfurled to serve as supertitles, but they were difficult or impossible to read. If program notes and translations had been made available along with a suggestion that people should peruse them before the concert and during intermission, a lot of folks would have benefited. Hartleben's poetry doesn't exactly constitute a story line, and knowing that, one is freed to enjoy the music and marvel at the performance.
(Anna Carol Dudley is a singer, teacher, member of the faculties of
UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University, and lecturer emerita and director emerita of the San Francisco Early Music Society's Baroque Music Workshop.)
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Lucy Shelton
