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The closing concert of this year’s Hatfield House Music Festival, in the Marble Hall at Hatfield House on Sunday 13 October 2024 paired [Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Schubert’s String Quintet in C major]. Soprano Claire Booth and Ensemble 360 (Juliette Bausor, flute, Robert Plane, clarinet, Benjamin Nabarro, violin, Gemma Rosefield, cello, Tim Horton, piano) performed Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire…
… Claire Booth and Ensemble 360 first performed Pierrot Lunaire together last year and they have since recorded the work and done further performances this year…
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The performers were placed in an arc, with Booth at its centre. The result, in terms of the sound, meant that [Booth] was very much primus inter pares rather than being completely spotlit, her vocal line part of the chamber ensemble. Word, pitch and vocal expression are clearly important to her, but the performance encompassed far more than that and ever syllable was accompanied by vivid gesture. Each of the movements became a small masterpiece in expressionist story-telling with Booth’s body language almost as important as the sound of her voice. We were provided with English translations but frankly, if you looked down to read them you missed so much.
“Booth and the Ensemble’s long experience of the work together really told. There was a genuine sense of chamber collaboration here, this was a long way from the sort of performance where a star performer gives ‘her’ interpretation accompanied by an ensemble. And the experience told in the way we felt the music as natural and obvious.”
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The opening paired Booth’s remarkable expressive range with an evocatively transparent web of instrumental sound, whilst Columbine was almost a waltz with Booth’s vocals dipping and bowing to match. The Dandy was vivid indeed, with startling moments from Booth in her remarkable characterisation, and from the instruments. The Pale Washerwoman set Booth’s suppressed excitement against the smooth instrumental lines, and ended finely up in the air. We returned to the idea of a watlz with Chopin, the busyness of the music paired with vivid gesture. Madonna unfolded with slow inevitability, leading to the remarkable duet of voice and flute for the sick moon.
“Night was dark and spare, strange sounds creating the world of the weird, whilst the Prayer to Pierrot was a story to be told. Theft was almost pure horror, with the performers relishing the way Schoenberg’s sounds echoed the text. Red Mass was serious, full of remarkable colours yet all hell did break loose.”
Gallows song was almost a patter song (!) with Booth giving a vivid tour de force. Beheading returned us to the sense of the waltz, vividly portrayed by all, creating a sort of mini-opera. There was an eerie strangeness to Crosses, whilst Benjamin Nabarro’s bitter-sweet violin perfectly matched Booth’s soprano in Homesickness… always expressive.
Practical joke was manic, and we were aware of a sense of the modern day Commedia dell’arte in Booth’s repertoire of gesture. Parodie featured a clearly very demanding duenna, whilst Moon fleck was vivid and delicate, leading to a helter skelter of madness. The cello solo in Serenade gives us an intriguing pre-echo (conceptual rather than musical, perhaps) of Debussy’s 1915 Cello Sonata which the composer evidently wanted to call Pierrot Angry at the Moon.
“Homeward journey continued that feeling of a serenade, the voice riding over the lovely instrumental textures. Finally, O sweet fragrance gave us an almost delicate drift of sound, evaporating on a question.”
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