Page 262 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

It grew out of a concert I did with Ensemble 360 a couple of years ago – I’ve done a few Pierrots in
my time, but we had a real blast with that one and I really wanted us to record it together. I was
aware that the 150th anniversary was coming up, and as far as I know there hasn’t been a
recording by a British singer since Jane Manning's.

I love the piece and have a long history with it: I first sang it when I was twenty, with Pierre
Boulez conducting, so I think I’m a valid interpreter. And the slapdash, have-a-go approach that
still persists with it makes me really quite angry: without naming names, I heard a recent
recording where it would be very generous to say that the singer uses the notes as a guideline,
which sums up everything I dislike about people’s attitude to Schoenberg.

I remember asking Boulez how to do Sprechgesang, and he said ‘You sing a bit, you speak a
bit…that’s it!’. It was quite freeing to hear that, but ‘sing a bit’ doesn’t mean you can sing wrong
notes! I don’t think it’s credible to say that because Schoenberg wrote the piece for an actress he
didn’t care what the notes were; if that were true then I don’t think he would’ve notated it like
that. There are so many scenarios in each bar where some sense of the pitch is integral to what’s
happening underneath; if you ignore that, then you’re literally singing gobbledegook and it
becomes nothing more than an amusing screamathon. I think it’s a fallacy that you can have
theatricality or accuracy - you have to have both, or leave it alone. Nobody would dream of
treating something like Tosca with so little care, so why isn’t Schoenberg afforded the same
respect?

What will you be programming alongside it?

It’s often paired with another Second Viennese School work, but I persuaded Ensemble 360 to go
with ‘Portraits of Pierrot’ as a working title. We have something from Schumann’s Carnaval,
something from Amy Beach’s Colombine, and something from Korngold’s Die tote Stadt. Then
there’s Debussy’s Pierrot, a piece by Max Kowalski (another Jewish composer who set Giraud’s
poems around the same time as Schoenberg), Poldowski’s Colombine, some Joseph Marx (who
lived in Vienna at the same time as Schoenberg but went in a different direction), then Thea
Musgrave’s fantastic Pierrot Trio for clarinet, violin and piano. There’s a lot of women in there as
it’s worked out, which is also nice!