Schoenberg: Pierrot Lunaire, Suite

This ambitious program by the Prazak Quartet and friends focuses on two key works by Arnold Schoenberg. The melodrama Pierrot Lunaire is a setting of twenty-one poems by Albert Giraud in which a singer/narrator delivers the poems in Sprechstimme style. The work is a study in paradoxes: the instrumentalists are soloists and an orchestra at the same time; Pierrot is both a hero and a fool, performing cabaret as high art and vice versa with song that is also speech; and his is a male role sung by a woman, who shifts between the first and third persons. The Suite Op.29 is one of the very first twelve-tone pieces in classical sonata form. The whole work is based on a single twelve-tone row that begins with the notes E flat and G, symbolizing "Schoenberg" and "Gertrude," his wife's name. Overall, the work is one of Schoenberg's lightest-textured and most attractive pieces.

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