Dolce Suono: Mahler and Schoenberg

Most music organizations schedule programs marking the 100th birthday of Composer X or the 250th year since Composer Y died. Leave it to Mimi Stillman to come up with an anniversary event that no one else seems to have thought of. Dolce Suono's "Mahler 100/Schoenberg 60" project commemorated the 100th anniversary of Mahler's death and the 60th anniversary of Schoenberg's.

At first glance that seems like an odd pairing. Mahler is noted, after all, for symphonies that continued the grand tradition of great orchestral works. Arnold Schoenberg is the apostate who invented atonal music.

But the joint anniversary makes sense because the two composers were actually good friends. Mahler supported Schoenberg, and Schoenberg admired his older colleague.

Last May, at the first program in this two-part series, Stillman's Dolce Suono players presented a varied program that included several new compositions written for the unusual combination of instruments used by Schoenberg in his groundbreaking song cycle, Pierrot lunaire.

The second program, this month, opened with Mahler's only surviving chamber work, the Piano Quartet in A Minor, and followed it with a new piece on lunar themes by Shulamit Ran plus a performance of Pierrot that starred one of its major living interpreters, the soprano Lucy Shelton. Schoenberg composed Pierrot in 1912, so the program also commemorated the 100th anniversary of a piece that's influenced most of the music composed during the last century.

Ghost of a wind

The Mahler consists of one movement for piano and string trio. It's marked by the same sharp changes in moods that you hear in his symphonies, and it includes some surprising tone colors. At times, in fact, the ghost of a wind instrument seems to have joined the strings.

The Dolce Suono ensemble gave it a dark, full-bodied performance by the strings, partnered by a flowing piano part played by Charles Abramovic. Had Mahler written more chamber music like this, his stature as a chamber composer would equal his stature in the orchestral world.

High-class cabaret act

Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire sets 21 poems about the Commedia Dell'arte character Pierrot, with lunar images running all through the cycle. For his instrumentation, Schoenberg opted for flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, with the violinist doubling on viola, and the flutist on the piccolo.

The soprano part employs a technique called Sprechstimme; the composer prescribes pitches, but the vocalist speaks the words and lands briefly on each pitch.

Pierrot was composed for a singer-actress who wanted a high-class cabaret act. Shelton created the cabaret atmosphere at this performance by sitting on a high stool in front of the piano, declaiming the part from memory, as if she was telling a Halloween story to a group of children.

Pierrot is a virtuoso challenge for all the performers, and Schoenberg created some powerful dramatic effects. But Shulamit Ran's Moon Songs spoke to me more than Schoenberg's piece.

Embracing the moon

For all its musical flair, Pierrot stays inside a narrow emotional channel. The poems all deal with the bizarre and violent aspects of the night. The four sections of Ran's Moon Songs span a broader range of styles and nocturnal moods.

Ran's opening section, entitled Creation, begins dramatically but ends with a Hebrew text, set to a rollicking folk-like accompaniment, that celebrates the Creator for making a moon we can use to calculate times and holidays.

In the second section, Ran switches to a translation from the Chinese that tells how a drunken Chinese poet tried to embrace the moon, fell into a river and died. It begins lightly but becomes more serious when she repeats the translation with melancholy interpolations from Matthew Arnold's poem, Dover Beach.

Ran's other two sections deal with love and other lunar emotions. Her finale repeats the folk-like thanksgiving for our lunar timepiece and ends with the soprano making a final flourish with a tambourine.

Silence of a cello

Moon Songs is scored for soprano, flute (doubling piccolo), cello and piano, but Ran creates plenty of variety with that small ensemble. The cello stays silent for long intervals and changes the entire character of the ensemble when it makes one of its entrances (Ran compensated for the silences by giving cellist Yumi Kendall a brief, beautiful solo as an entr'acte after the second section).

Charles Abramovic's work at the piano ranged from a rolling melody at the beginning of the second act to notably expressive passages in other sections.

In addition to doubling flute and piccolo, Mimi Stillman recited a few spoken lines in the section devoted to the Chinese poet and manipulated the strings of the piano with a stick while Abramovic worked away at the keyboard.

Stillman conceived this project, organized it and (presumably) handled much of the fund-raising and other organizational matters, while maintaining her solo career and doing much of the other work that keeps Dolce Suono going. If we could clone her a few times, Philadelphia would become the musical capital of the U.S.♦


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