Page 298 - Media Coverage Book - 75th Aldeburgh Festival 2024

very much part of the Expressionist movement and Claire points out the fact
that he could call a painting Tears or Hatred. She sees Expressionism as
trying to mainline emotion, terrific as a creative force with the paintings helping
create a narrative arc for the songs on the disc. Painting was the same for
Schoenberg as making music, and he revelled how culture could be hybrid.
This is something that Claire appreciates and she comments that we seem to
be moving away from the 20th century's focus on celebrity monoculture, the
idea that artists concentrate on just one thing.

She hopes that, following on from the disc, festivals will be interested as
Schoenberg's songs deserve to be better known and there are plenty of ways
into the repertoire, they are far more than one-colour works. There is
deliberately nothing of Pierrot Lunaire on the Expressionist Music disc as the
work is completely seminal and it is hard to better it.

Claire performed Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire last year with Ensemble 360
(the ensemble resident at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre), in the round and
without a conductor. Pierrot Lunaire is a work she has lived with and
performed ever since that first performance with Boulez when she was straight
out of college. Last year's performance seemed to deserve further life, and
having lived with the work for what feels like ages, this seemed a good
opportunity to record it. The disc, with Ensemble 360, is released on 27
September on Onyx Classics.

But having decided to record Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, there came the
question of what to record with it. Having realised that she would like to do
some singing on the disc, as opposed to the Sprechstimme used in Pierrot
Lunaire, the idea was conceived to look at other manifestations of Pierrot.
Whilst the disc does include music by Robert Schumann and Thea Musgrave,
its main focus is on works by contemporaries of Schoenberg. Claire sees the
popularity of the Pierrot figure to be a manifestation of late 19th and early
20th-century Expressionism. Hard to pin down, it seems to arise from
boredom with the status quo and Pierrot is a mask that anyone can put on. It
proved easy, in a way, to look at how other composers felt beguiled by the
figure. Giraud's poetry (on which Schoenberg based Pierrot Lunaire) was set
by other composers and the disc casts its net widely with music by Korngold,
Kowalsky, Joseph Marx, Poldowsky, and Amy Beach.