LCCE to Celebrate Schoenberg’s 150th Birthday

Arnold Schoenberg at work (photograph provided courtesy of LCCE)

Arnold Schoenberg was born on September 13, 1874, meaning that his 150th birthday was celebrated last month. Jonathan Khuner marked the occasion with a Celebrating Schoenberg concert series, which included a performance by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) of a melodrama, whose full title is “Dreimal sieben Gedichte aus Albert Girauds ‘Pierrot lunaire’” (three times seven poems from Albert Giraud’s Pierrot Lunaire). Next month LCCE will begin its own 2024/25 season, and the title of the first program will be Fall Cabaret: Pierrot Lunaire.

The entire program was conceived to explore the extremes of drama and poetry within the intimate setting of chamber music. The texts for Schoenberg’s score will be delivered by soprano Nikki Einfeld, but they will not be sung in the conventional sense of the word. Rather, the texts are delivered in a style called Sprechstimme (spoken singing). Schoenberg wrote his own foreword for the published score, in which he tried to explain the vocal technique as follows:

The goal is certainly not at all a realistic, natural speech. On the contrary, the difference between ordinary speech and speech that collaborates in a musical form must be made plain. But it should not call singing to mind, either.

By way of disclaimer, I should make it clear that I am no stranger to this technique or to how it is performed. This was due primarily to the commitment of six students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, who prepared a performance for the end of the fall semester of 2009. Their performance of Schoenberg’s score was so successful that they remained as a group after graduating, calling themselves Nonsemble 6.

For next month’s performance, Einfeld will be joined by Stacey Pelinka on flute, Jerome Simas on clarinet, Anna Presler on violin, Tanya Tomkins on cello, and pianist Eric Zivian. Matilda Hofman will conduct. The second half of the program will offer two selections. The first of these will be Five Haiku, the LCCE 2022 Composition Contest Winner composed by Tomàs Peire-Serrate. The program will then conclude with “Carlos Drummond de Andrade Stories,” scored for soprano and chamber orchestra by Maria Schneider with English translations of the texts by Mark Strand.

The San Francisco performance of Fall Cabaret will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, November 2. The venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry, which is located in Noe Valley (of course) at 1021 Sanchez Street, just south of 23rd Street. General admission will be $35 with a $15 rate for students and $5 for those affiliated with Arts Access. All tickets may be purchased online through a single TIX Web page. They may also be dowloaded and printed at home at no extra charge.