It is easy to forget that Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire was originally written for an actress. The work famously changed musical history - partly through its establishment of atonality as the defining harmonic language of German expressionism, and partly because it gave us sprechgesang, that startling system of pitched speech that became expressionism's dominant vocal mode. Since its 1912 premiere, however, Pierrot Lunaire has become the province of the diva: singers as far apart as Cleo Laine and Brigitte Fassbaender have battled with its complexities.
This performance, however, returned to Schoenberg's original concept. The brainchild of pianist Mitsuko Uchida, who led the accompanying ensemble, it featured the great German actress Barbara Sukowa, and was electrifying.
Dressed in austere black, Sukowa - an ageless blonde beauty, star of films by Fassbinder and Margarethe von Trotta - delivered the work from memory; she was at once the self-assured cabaret diseuse and a blasphemous high priestess presiding over Pierrot's ritual descent into near-madness. Poised on a dais above the players, she stretched her hands over them as if they were marionettes, before descending from her plinth to address a sexually ambivalent love song to flautist Marina Piccinini or to stare quizzically at cellist Nina Maria Lee as the latter imitated Pierrot's fiddle playing.
Her voice caressed, nagged and snarled, occasionally taking flight into deranged snatches of lyricism that sounded like an untrained singer tackling a bravura aria by Mozart. Uchida and the ensemble, performing without a conductor, surrounded Sukowa's utterances with shards of sound that slid from tenderness to viciousness.
Earlier in the evening, the Brentano Quartet, of which Lee is a member, gave a violent performance of Berg's Lyric Suite, while Uchida played Schubert's D899 set of Impromptus with emotive finesse. Both were superb. But Sukowa's Pierrot Lunaire will live on in the memory as a benchmark performance that sets new standards of interpretation.
