Hebrides Ensemble/Lamprea review – Schoenberg’s Pierrot is pushed to extremes

As well as being one of the landmarks of musical modernism, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire is often cited as one of the precursors of late 20th-century music theatre. But defining what kind of work it really is, and therefore how it should be presented, is not straightforward. These expressionist settings of 21 poems by Albert Giraud (sung in German translations from French) certainly do not add up to a fully fledged theatre piece, even though at their first performance in Berlin in 1912 the soloist was alone on stage dressed in a Pierrot costume, with the instrumentalists hidden behind a screen, but also it’s much more than a straightforward song cycle.

Performers of Schoenberg’s score have plenty of theatrical scope for their interpretations, but visually at least for their performance at the Spitalfields music festival, the Colombian-American soprano Stephanie Lamprea and the Hebrides Ensemble adopted a relatively restrained approach. Lamprea was dressed severely in black, and a series of abstract paintings by the Glasgow artist Kirsty Matheson, inspired by each of the 21 movements of Schoenberg’s cycle, were displayed at the back of the hall.

Musically, though, Lamprea’s approach was less restrained. Though clearly inhabiting every particle of the score, her performance was Expressionist with a capital E, with everything pushed to extremes. At times one needed a bit more nuance, a wider, more refined emotional range, and just a bit more attention to the words and, while the instrumental playing from the members of the Hebrides Ensemble was superb, it too seemed to emphasise that edge of hysteria which is only one aspect of Schoenberg’s score.

The Pierrot theme ran through the entire programme. Lamprea and the ensemble gave the first performance of Electra Perivolaris’s Brushstrokes of Nightmares and Dreams, commissioned for this concert, a sequence of instrumental movements and vocal interludes inspired by four of Matheson’s paintings, while Helen Grime’s Seven Pierrot Miniatures take as their starting points poems from Giraud’s collection that Schoenberg did not set. Both works are fluently written and well stocked with telling musical imagery, but neither quite captures the mix of nightmare and fantasy, sweetness and horror, that Giraud, and Schoenberg after him, evoke so tellingly.