Soft clarinet playing in the darkened hall tells you that it is night. Even if it is Sunday afternoon and the projected full moon on the uneven wall of the Jurriaanse Zaal in the Rotterdam Doelen looks like a block puzzle, it doesn’t matter; the Moldovan violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja convinces in Arnold Schönbergs Pierrot Lunaire (1912).
Kopatchinskaya, who shows here that she is not only an adventurous violinist but also an exceptionally expressive recitalist, is dressed as the classic Pierrot. She wears the wide, beige blouse with large buttons, has a white face and the black beret on her head. Aroused from her snoring by the calm clarinet, she wanders like Pierrot in his moonlit spirit world, dominated by dreams and demons.
The cycle of twenty-one poems translated into German (from Albert Giraud’s French-language collection of fifty) is set to six instruments and a speaking voice (Sprechgesang), whereby the vocalist must adhere to the pitches and durations determined by Schönberg. That’s no mean feat, but stage animal Kopatchinskaja puts down a captivating, human Pierrot.
She growls, screams and whispers. At the end of Gebet to Pierrot she tackles the forgotten laughter with a forced laughter therapy. Involuntarily you are chuckling yourself. to in Rote Messe, in which Pierrot offers his own heart to the faithful, to be engulfed by Kopatchinskaya’s shrill screams. In HeimfahrtWhen the night begins to give way to a sun-drenched day, she spreads her arms touchingly exuberant like a child. Meanwhile, the volatile violin lines and the shrill piccolo cries rest on the violin, viola, cello and piano, which rise like pillars in the bottomless, atonal music.
Pierrot Lunaire
Classic
★★★★
From Arnold Schoenberg by Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin and speaking voice)
23/10, de Doelen, Rotterdam.