Back-to-back performances by singer/conductor Barbara Hannigan, and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, plus Hilla Baggio and the Israeli Chamber Project
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Barbara Hannigan, soprano, and Bertrand Chamayou, piano
When: Nov. 30, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Chan Centre for the Performing Arts, 6265 Crescent Rd.
Israeli Chamber Project with soprano Hila Baggio
When: Dec.1, 3 p.m.
Where: Vancouver Playhouse, 600 Hamilton St.
If it seemed like too many classical music offerings this fall have been entirely conventional, this weekend, the Vancouver Recital Society definitely opts out of the safe and predictable. Back-to-back performances by singer/conductor Barbara Hannigan, and a rare performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, plus two other works from the early20th century, featuring soprano Hilla Baggio and the Israeli Chamber Project promise to shake things up.
For her Chan Centre performance. Hannigan will be working with co-recitalist Bertrand Chamayou. The songs by Oliver Messiaen which open their program bring to mind an extraordinary VRS event earlier this fall—the fierce and moving performance by Tamara Stefanovich of selections from Messiaen’s keyboard works. The French master’s Chants de Terre et Ciel (Songs of Earth and Heaven) is an early set of six songs; three rather touchingly relate to the domestic life of the composer, with references to his wife and the birth of their son; the remaining songs explore, as is so often the case with Messiaen, matters spiritual.
As both an interlude and a showcase, Chamayou will perform two works by the Russian composer Scriabin, his Poème-nocturne, Op. 61, and the febrile Vers La Flamme, Op. 72. The extraordinary program’s grand finale is John Zorn’s Jumalattaret. Born in 1953, Zorn is a true maverick: jazz, film, and concert music among his enthusiasms, but he’s avoided classification through his career and now has a ferociously committed cult following. His Jumalattaret, written a decade ago, was roundly considered that it couldn’t be performed. Not, it would seem, by Chamayou and Hannigan — they are performing it in some 14 North American centres this fall.
Stravinsky’s ballet The Rite of Spring is often considered the work that brought full-blown modernism to the classical world. But Schoenberg’s 21 Pierrot Lunaire songs, which premiered in 1912, a year before Stravinsky’s ballet, are even more radical. They demand audiences rethink virtually everything about the nature of music, beginning with a soprano who recites rather than sings. However iconoclastic the effect, the songs are intricately structured and very much indebted to abiding classical traditions.
Soprano Baggio made her well-remembered Vancouver debut in a program of Polish cabaret songs with the Jerusalem String Quartet, and completely charmed her audience. Charm is hardly the first word that comes to mind about Pierrot Lunaire, but it is a powerful, memorable demonstration of the progressive musical idiom of pre-First World War Vienna, and one of the greatest masterworks of the modernist canon.