MUSIC REVIEW : Sukowa Hypnotic in Schoenberg’s ‘Pierrot Lunaire’

It wasn’t just another Monday Evening Concert this week at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Instead of the usual assortment of local virtuosos who happen to be sympathetic to modern muses, a splendid group of specialists from Europe--the Amsterdam Schoenberg Ensemble--occupied the stage of the Bing Theater.

Their fascinating program was dominated by a milestone of 20th-Century evolution and revolution, Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire.” But instead of the usual quasi-operatic soprano, a daring actress ventured the treacherously mercurial solo lines.

The daring actress turned out to be none less than Barbara Sukowa, the charismatic art-house diva who has inspired such directors as Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta and Volker Schlondorff.

Schoenberg devised a weird and wonderful mode of declamation for the protagonist of “Pierrot”--half song and half speech. This Sprechgesang , predicated on specific rhythms and vague pitches, weaves Albert Giraud’s poetry in and out of an amazingly complex yet gratifyingly transparent instrumental fabric.

The composer claimed that he wanted no theatrical reinforcement of his eerie score. The scale is painfully intimate, the tone coldly expressionist.

“At no time,” he wrote, “do the performers have the obligation to shape the mood and character of the individual pieces out of the meaning of the words, but always out of the music.”

Undaunted, Sukowa offered an overwhelmingly dramatic exercise in interpretive intensity. She wore a stark black silk dress, no jewelry and no shoes. She decorated the the agitated songs with overwrought gestures, as if barely suppressing a desire to conduct the score. In the reflective songs, she retreated to an aura of numb repose. Even here, however, her eyes flashed urgent, mysterious messages.

Although the tone at her command was a bit wispy, she articulated the hysterical cantilena with impeccable musicality and astonishing precision. She commands a wide range of vocal color to offset a narrow range of vocal dynamics, and was careful to adjust her sound to the shifting instrumental timbres.

She inflected the text with subjective pathos that may have exceeded the composer’s objective intentions. She insisted on playing to a darkened auditorium, and thus prevented the audience from following the printed translations. But, in her heroic depiction of decadent compulsion, she was hypnotic.

After 80 years, “Pierrot Lunaire” still seems provocatively modern. And it still yields a telling variety of plausible readings.

The Amsterdam ensemble under Reinbert de Leeuw provided a sensitive, poised, subtly nuanced collaboration. In this context, accompaniment would be the wrong word.

During the first half of the well-balanced program, the players offered disparate demonstrations of romantic sensibility in decay.

Isang Yun’s “Distances” for winds and string quintet, written in 1988 when the Korean expatriate was 71, persuasively fused lush sonorities with lean harmonies in a landscape of ever-shifting textures. Edison Denisov’s elegant Sextet, written in 1984 when the Siberian composer was 55, sensuously spoke a conventional language with a contemporary accent.

Six compellingly overripe songs written between 1910 and 1913 by Alexander von Zemlinsky on texts by Maeterlinck were held over from the Amsterdam concert at El Camino College on Sunday. Rosemary Hardy again served as the appreciative soprano soloist in chamber-ensemble reductions of the composer’s orchestral settings.

The Monday Evening management provided spotty annotations further marred by careless proofreading. As always, the Monday Evening audience made up in discerning sophistication for what it lacked in numbers.