Espressivo Orchestra Performs Pierrot Lunaire and Histoire du Soldat

Directed by Michel Singher, Espressivo -- a small, intense orchestra -- will perform two iconic and unconventional works that bracket the First World War and reflect the cultural restart that scorching inferno wrought.

Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire (1912)
with Betany Coffland, Sprechstimme

and

Igor Stravinsky's Histoire du Soldat (The Soldier's Tale) (1918)
with
Daniel Helfgot, Director
Jeannine Charles, Choreographer
Stephen Guggenheim, Narrator
members of ArtistEDGE Dance Company

Both works integrate the spoken word in a musical fabric, though what Schoenberg calls for is a rare hybridization of speech and song. Stravinsky's "Histoire", in addition, includes a visual element, the dance.

"Pierrot" is a hinge between the overripe and the newborn in that its text, a German translation of a cycle of French poems, is a hangover from late-19th-century Romantic excess, which its musical language both reflects and mocks while, in a profound technical revolution, rejecting the attachment to a central note that had been fundamental to music since the Renaissance (hence its label as "atonal music"). "Histoire", on the other hand, has given sentimentality an acid bath, but its musical language is conservative inasmuch as it superimposes classical musical gestures in new, asymmetrical and out-of-phase combinations, in a manner similar to what Cubist painting was doing with received images. Like some of those paintings, it also explicitly refers to American jazz.

Both works retain an element of the caricatures embodied in the improvisatory street theater of the 17th and 18th centuries, the commedia dell'arte. (Pierrot is the lovesick clown the Anglo-Saxon world knows as Punch.) Indeed, once could draw an arrow from "Lunar Pierrot" to Looney Tunes. "Pierrot Lunaire" and "Histoire du Soldat" are both narratives-- "Pierrot" indirectly, "L'histoire" explicitly. Each is, ultimately, an entertainment.