Ensemble Offspring - Moonstruck

Program

Arnold Schoenberg - Pierrot lunaire (1912)

Laura Bowler - Deconstructing Pierrot (2024)*

*Australian premiere - co-commissioned by Red Note Ensemble (Scotland), Music on Main (Canada) and Ensemble Offspring

Pierrot lunaire sits somewhere between cabaret and concert, acting and singing, madness and depravity. Showcasing the extraordinary talents of soprano Jane Sheldon, it flirts with chaos as Arnold Schoenberg translates each tiny poem into music. It’s over a hundred years old, but it remains radical to the ear – a revolutionary classic that transformed music and concerts forever, just as Cubism changed painting. Even Ensemble Offspring’s distinctive line-up of musicians can be traced to this iconic creation and its grungy tale of the ‘moonstruck’ clown of commedia dell’arte.

In a one night only reprise, post our AGNSW Klänge performance in 2024, Pierrot lunaire looks to Ensemble Offspring’s origins and imagines the future. And we’re pitting it against a long form new work by ‘triple threat composer-performer provocatrice’ Laura Bowler. In a fresh interpretation of Albert Giraud’s poems, Bowler will deconstruct and repurpose Schoenberg’s original musical material, viewing it through a contemporary queer lens in ‘a subversive act of defiance of the great master’. International star mezzo-soprano Jessica Aszodi, one of the “finest actress-singers in the country” (The Age) joins us for the virtuosic challenge of Schoenberg’s reimagined vocal lines.

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