Patricia Kopatchinskaja
Pierrot lunaire
★★★★☆
Sampson/Middleton
Album für die Frau
★★★☆☆
Considering the startling sounds when Patricia Kopatchinskaja plays her violin, it’s only to be expected that the jolts continue when the instrument is locked in its case. On her latest album this maverick only picks up her bow for track 22 and beyond. Before that she’s the singer-speaker who navigates the flexibly pitched vocal line in Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire of 1912 — still the most famous showcase for the expressionist technique of sprechgesang, or spoken singing.
She certainly offers a striking interpretation of the poems by Albert Giraud — 21 absurd dreamscapes haunted by the clown figure Pierrot, the moon, blood and much else. I’ve never heard them delivered with so many screams, shudders, croaks or growls. This isn’t a song cycle any more; it’s a music-theatre madhouse — a risky development for a work in which Schoenberg wanted equality between his vocalist and small group of instrumentalists. Sometimes Kopatchinskaja is too loud; mostly she’s too quiet, muttering in the undergrowth behind the writhing clarity of the ensemble’s violin, flute, clarinet, cello and piano.
Still, we can certainly clap her bravura. And there are always the 13 eloquent other tracks, all Viennese, mostly atonal but crowned with a deliciously poised account of Schoenberg’s airy chamber arrangement of Johann Strauss’s Emperor Waltz.
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Another classic work gets a brush-up in Album für die Frau, in which Robert Schumann’s 19th-century song cycle Frauenliebe und Leben is expanded in an attempt to make the poems’ gender roles reflect 21st-century concerns. By adding songs by Schumann’s composer wife, Clara, the soprano Carolyn Sampson and pianist Joseph Middleton strengthen the feminine perspective moment by moment, but it’s only when Clara drops out halfway through that the recital really catches fire.
I’m thinking of the fragile beauty Sampson brings to the intimation of pregnancy in Robert’s Süsser Freund; the tenderness, too, of the lullaby Der Sandmann and the last songs of death and mourning. Sampson is eloquent in a cautious way and Middleton is lovingly nimble when Clara’s accompaniments get frilly. But as an album for 21st-century women, I don’t think the case is proven. (Alpha Classics; BIS)
