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Schoenberg - Pierrot Lunaire & Other Works

£14.26

In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day

Label: Alpha

Cat No: ALPHA722

Barcode: 3760014197222

Format: CD + Book

Number of Discs: 1

Release Date: 16th April 2021

Works

Kreisler, Fritz

Marche miniature viennoise

Schoenberg, Arnold

Kleine Klavierstucke (6), op.19
Phantasy, op.47
Pierrot Lunaire, op.21

Strauss II, Johann

Kaiserwalzer, op.437 (arr. Schoenberg)

Webern, Anton

Pieces (4) for violin and piano, op.7

Artists

Patricia Kopatchinskaja (Sprechgesang, violin)
Meesun Hong (violin, viola)
Julia Gallego (flute)
Reto Bieri (clarinet)
Marko Milenkovic (viola)
Thomas Kaufmann (cello)
Joonas Ahonen (piano)

Works

Kreisler, Fritz

Marche miniature viennoise

Schoenberg, Arnold

Kleine Klavierstucke (6), op.19
Phantasy, op.47
Pierrot Lunaire, op.21

Strauss II, Johann

Kaiserwalzer, op.437 (arr. Schoenberg)

Webern, Anton

Pieces (4) for violin and piano, op.7

Artists

Patricia Kopatchinskaja (Sprechgesang, violin)
Meesun Hong (violin, viola)
Julia Gallego (flute)
Reto Bieri (clarinet)
Marko Milenkovic (viola)
Thomas Kaufmann (cello)
Joonas Ahonen (piano)

About

Pierrot lunaire, premiered in Berlin in 1912, is a series of twenty-one short melodramas for voice and five instruments on German translations of poems by Albert Giraud. Here the composer first introduces Sprechgesang (speech-song), a technique that revolutionised declamation. Schoenberg wanted the piece to be ironic, at once tender and grotesque, in the manner of cabaret songs.

Patricia Kopatchinskaja, the violinist who is also an occasional actress, had long dreamt of playing and reciting this unique work. It was a pain in her arm preventing her from playing the violin that one day propelled her into the role of narrator: ‘All my life I have felt that I was Pierrot. Every time I played this piece on the violin when I was a student, I would say the words in my head.’ She has now played and performed Pierrot in many venues around the world, including the Berlin Philharmonie, several cities in the United States, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden. Now she has assembled a number of her musician friends and decided to record it for posterity.

Schoenberg’s Phantasy, op.47, and Six Little Piano Pieces, op.19, complete the programme, along with works by Webern (Four Pieces for violin and piano, op.7) and Schoenberg’s arrangement of Johann Strauss’s Kaiser-Walzer (Emperor Waltz), op.437.

Sound/Video

Paused

1

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 1: Mondestrunken
2

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 1: Colombine
3

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 1: Der Dandy
4

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 1: Eine Blasse Wäscherin
5

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 1: Valse De Chopin
6

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 1: Madonna
7

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 1: Der Kranke Mond
8

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 2: Nacht (Passacaglia)
9

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 2: Gebet An Pierrot
10

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 2: Raub
11

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 2: Rote Messe
12

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 2: Enthauptung
13

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 2: Die Kreuze
14

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 3: Heimweh
15

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 3: Gemeinheit
16

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 3: Parodie
17

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 3: Der Mondfleck
18

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 3: Serenade
19

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 3: Heimfahrt
20

Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Op. 21 - Part 3: O Alter Duft
21

Strauss Jr. (J): Emperor’s Waltz, Op. 437
22

Schoenberg: Phantasy For Violin & Piano, Op. 47
23

Webern: 4 Pieces, Op. 7 - 1. Sehr Langsam
24

Webern: 4 Pieces, Op. 7 - 2. Rasch
25

Webern: 4 Pieces, Op. 7 - 3. Sehr Langsam
26

Webern: 4 Pieces, Op. 7 - 4. Bewegt
27

Kreisler: Little Viennese March
28

Schoenberg: 6 Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 - 1. Leich Zart
29

Schoenberg: 6 Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 - 2. Langsam
30

Schoenberg: 6 Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 - 3. Sehr Langsame Viertel
31

Schoenberg: 6 Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 - 4. Rasch, Aber Leicht
32

Schoenberg: 6 Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 - 5. Etwas Rasch
33

Schoenberg: 6 Kleine Klavierstücke, Op. 19 - 6. Sehr Langsam

Europadisc Review

The background to this new recording of Arnold Schoenberg’s early modernist masterpiece, the song-cycle Pierrot lunaire, is almost as remarkable as the performance itself. When in 2015 the brilliant, iconoclastic violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja was forced by an attack of tendonitis to cut down on her playing, she immersed herself in learning to perform Pierrot’s formidably demanding Sprechstimme (‘speech-song’) vocal part, and has since made something of a speciality of the role with various international ensembles. Her palpable sense of involvement in the project has its roots in her passion for the music of the Second Viennese School, an enthusiasm she clearly shares with the hand-picked members of the ensemble on this recording, a classy line-up including pianist Joonas Ahonen and cellist Thomas Kaufmann.

While most performances of Pierrot lunaire are led by a classically-trained soprano in the ‘title’ role, Schoenberg originally composed these ‘three times seven’ songs (to texts by Albert Giraud, in the German translation by Otto Erich Hartleben) for cabaret-style performance by the actress Albertine Zehme, who was experienced in the art of melodrama: the recitation of spoken texts over a musical accompaniment. Artists including jazz singer Cleo Laine, actress Barbara Sukowa and even singer-songwriter Björk have continued this tradition, so that the assumption of the role by a classical violinist might seem positively strait-laced by comparison. This performance, however, most certainly isn’t! While following fairly closely the contours and pitches of the carefully-notated vocal line, Kopatchinskaja’s rendition is arguably more speech than song, revelling in and often exaggerating the consonants of Hartleben’s German text. At times, purists might feel that the element of self-mockery is too much to the fore, yet Schoenberg himself spoke of the work’s ‘light, ironic-satirical tone’, and it is to this that PatKop’s performance repeatedly returns.

Often, as in her explosive account of the third song (‘Der Dandy’) or the voice-and-flute seventh (‘Der kranke Mond’ / ‘The sick moon’), Kopatchinskaja seems to tap into the ‘animalistic’ immediacy of expression about which Schoenberg wrote when he started composing the work, ‘as if everything was transmitted directly’. In the death-haunted, macabre central group of songs, her performance teeters between parody (Papagena in old-maid guise?) and Expressionist indulgence, and eyebrows may be raised at, for example, the stammered close of no.9 (‘Gebet an Pierrot’ / ‘Prayer to Pierrot’). Yet the refinement of Schoenberg’s instrumental writing and the quality of the playing here ensure that the nightmarish mood (moving from intoxication to one of increasing horror) is captured, not least in the instrumental postlude to the thirteenth song (‘Enthauptung’ / ‘Decapitation’). The gradual move away from the grotesque to an atmosphere of dreamlike nostalgia in the final group of songs is as affecting as it was surely meant to be, without any excess of sentimentality, yet still in keeping with the burlesque tone of the performance as a whole. As a supplement to a more traditionally ‘voiced’ performance, Kopatchinskaja’s is an involving and rewarding alternative view of the work, and one that demands a hearing in uncompromising terms.

For the rest of the programme, PatKop returns to her more customary role of violinist: in a similarly vivid and visceral performance of Schoenberg’s 12-tone Phantasy for violin and piano, op.47, and Webern’s characteristically aphoristic Four Pieces, op.7. These works are sandwiched between Schoenberg’s arrangement of Johann Strauss II’s Emperor Waltz (the introduction knowing, almost tongue-in-cheek, the richly-detailed performance as a whole treading a fine line between affectionate tribute and mocking pastiche) and Fritz Kreisler’s paprika-infused Marche miniature viennoise, included here as a tribute to the famous 1900 photograph of Kreisler and Schoenberg in a cabaret-style quintet. Ahonen’s beautifully-poised account of the latter’s Six Little Piano Pieces, op.19, makes a perfect (and unexpectedly low-key) conclusion to a generous programme.

Adding to this album’s considerable attractions are an essay by Lukas Fierz that traces the wider contexts for Giraud’s and Schoenberg’s Pierrot, and a lavishly produced hardback-style presentation with many full-colour illustrations ranging from Watteau and Willette to Paul Klee, a page from Schoenberg’s autograph score, a flyer for the 1912 premiere, and even Schoenberg’s own painting of Gustav Mahler’s burial, the inspiration for the last of his op.19 pieces. For a work so rich in cultural allusions and symbols, this contextualisation is invaluable. It all adds to the sense of a top-drawer, exuberantly alert performance that is sure to enthrall Kopatchinskaja’s fans, and is likely to earn Schoenberg’s masterpiece many new admirers.

Reviews

On her latest album this maverick only picks up her bow for track 22 and beyond. Before that she’s the singer-speaker who navigates the flexibly pitched vocal line in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire of 1912 — still the most famous showcase for the expressionist technique of sprechgesang, or spoken singing. She certainly offers a striking interpretation of the poems by Albert Giraud… we can certainly clap her bravura

The Times 14 April 2021

As you’d expect from such an outstanding musician, her performance is impressively accurate, the realisation of the sprechgesang spot-on in rhythm and pitch, while the playing of the hand-picked ensemble around her is equally precise

The Guardian 15 April 2021

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Condition	Description
New	Brand new item, only ever sourced from the official UK distributor. Usually seal-wrapped, although a minority of labels do not use seal-wrap.
Used - Mint	Used item in excellent condition. Not usually seal-wrapped.
Used - Good	Used item with some minor signs of wear and tear. Never seal-wrapped.
Used - Acceptable	Used item with obvious scuffs or cosmetic damage to the case or booklet. Never seal-wrapped.

Condition	Description
New	Brand new item, only ever sourced from the official UK distributor. Usually seal-wrapped, although a minority of labels do not use seal-wrap.
Used - Mint	Used item in excellent condition. Not usually seal-wrapped.
Used - Good	Used item with some minor signs of wear and tear. Never seal-wrapped.
Used - Acceptable	Used item with obvious scuffs or cosmetic damage to the case or booklet. Never seal-wrapped.

Schoenberg - Pierrot Lunaire & Other Works

In stock - available for despatch within 1 working day

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Contents

Works

Artists

Works

Artists

About

Sound/Video

Paused

Europadisc Review

Reviews

Also Available

£14.26

£66.19

£14.26

£14.26

£14.26

Condition Information

Condition Information