Subject: Pierrot Lunaire, BAC 11Jan98

There's allegedly a St Distaff's day which marks the end of the Christmas
holiday. It's not quite a holiday, but not a proper work day either. (I
think you go into work, but then fool around all day.) This excellent
production of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire isn't quite opera, but it will
do nicely until we get the real thing back after a month of Messiahs.

The Clod Ensemble

Reciter    Anna Myatt
Conductor  James Keane

Director   Suzy Wilson
English translation
           Alice Oswald

Pierrot Lunaire, written in 1912, consists of settings of a cycle of twenty
one poems which were originally written in French by Albert Giraud and
translated for Schoenberg to set by Erich Hartleben.

Although there is only one vocalist, it's definitely a drama, not a song
cycle. The reciter, who performs pitched speech and other vocal effects,
represents the crazy Pierrot of the commedia dell'arte, in love with the
moon. He experiences the transformations of his beloved in light and
darkness until daylight brings an awareness of his delusions in the final
piece. Each poem focusses on a single concrete image related to light,
night or blood, often embodied as a commedia-like figure, for example, the
dandy, Columbine or Madonna.

This production was in one of the studios at the Battersea Arts Centre. The
six instrumentalists were arranged in a white installation, with the
violinist's skirt covering the whole of the structure, while the reciter
and (minimally) the conductor moved around. Everyone wore white
Pierrot-like outfits and joined in the performance with gestures and flops.
The only props were a couple of mirrors, used to evoke the dandy and to
create (on the audience) the speck of moonlight that Pierrot tries to rub
off. The overall effect was perhaps similar to the courtiers in Christopher
Alden's ENO Ariodante, but less threatening, and sad -- the white, fixed,
many-headed set was like something out of a lugubrious nightmare. Or like
Pierrot's obsessive object of desire.

The audience stood squeezed in around the edges of the studio. (We were
encouraged to promenade, but there wasn''t exactly room.) The translation
(mainly unreadable, but looking elegant) was projected in gold script on a
blue backgound on one wall, and the lighting changed dramatically for each
piece.

Anna Myatt, the reciter, performed energetically and expressively, and the
playing was dramatic. Altogether a splendid three-quarters of an hour, well
worth going to Lavender Hill for. (BAC, BTW, also has a theatre which is
used for fringe opera productions quite often.)

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The only work of Michael Tippett's that I've seen is the video of King
Priam, directed by Nicholas Hynter for Kent Opera (and evidence of why Kent
Opera in its old incarnation is so much missed). I fished it out of a
bargain bin at MDC a while ago, and was overwhelmed when I watched it. When
I heard that Tippett had died, on Friday, I watched it again and again
found it humane and deeply moving. I suppose I originally expected 1960s
anti-war gestures, but what Tippett wrote gets close to the feel of the
Homeric and tragic originals. He conveys the sense of the inevitability of
the choice of violence, because of the way people are, as well as the
redeeming sympathetic pain of the protagonists themselves and the
onlookers.

I also started on Tippett's autobiography, Twentieth century blues, which
is essentially a transcription of remniscences from tape and offers a
sequence of genial paragraphs rather than an examined life. But Tippett's
straighforward humanity is always obvious, as well as his complete
open-mindedness about most things.

Near the beginning, there's a passage where he describes how he was given a
copy of The golden bow. This, he says, made him aware of the origins of
drama in ritual, and informed his approach to opera later. At first my toes
curled -- The Golden Bow is totally free of any dramatic sense of ritual,
and is famously silly in general. But Tippett was clearly someone who used
whatever he found that moved him, and this acknowledgement is typical of
his straightforwardness.