The Cape Verdean choreographer and director Marlene Monteiro Freitas stages Arnold Schönberg’s “Pierrot lunaire” in overwhelming images and lets the Commedia dell’arte figure – naive, curious, eccentric, lonely – stagger through a visual adventure.

Schönberg’s 1912 composition for speaking voice and chamber ensemble sets 21 poems from Albert Giraud’s cycle “Pierrot lunaire” to music. Freely associating, Monteiro Freitas complements the musical level with a multitude of visual details such as glances, gestures, bodies, objects, colors, which combine to form fascinatingly enigmatic scenes.

The experimental vocalist Sofia Jernberg and Klangforum Wien, under the musical direction of Ingo Metzmacher, are all performers in a kaleidoscopic universe that follows its own rules and allows the audience to immerse themselves in the mystical world of “Pierrot lunaire”. Between speech and song, intimacy and expressiveness, comedy and tragedy, a mosaic of absurd, sometimes funny, sometimes touching snapshots emerges that illuminate the question of the essence of Pierrot.

Photo: Nurith Wagner-Strauss
Text: Kunstfestspiele Herrenhausen