thirteen ways

It’s December, which in the music world means it’s time for holiday concerts. Which, if you’re eighth blackbird, means a performance of Pierrot lunaire. A song cycle of 21 poems done in German dealing with topics as far ranging as the moon and a beheading is almost the same thing as a service of Lessons and Carols, right?

The weekend’s going to be full with re-staging rehearsals. This production we’re doing is the new one we developed for Ojai this past May, so it’s all ready to go, but a tad bit removed from our current short term memory. We’re preceding it this time with three pieces that have disparate but interesting links to Schoenberg: a set of Kurt Weill songs (Weill and Schoenberg were working at the same time and, well, mostly hated one another), Alban Berg’s Adagio, which is an arrangement (for clarinet, violin, and piano) of the second movement of his Chamber Concerto (Berg worked with Schoenberg, and this movement in particular is a musical depiction of Schoenberg’s love for his wife), and George Perle’s Critical Moments 2 (Perle was one of the most interesting American 12-tone composers, the form of composing that Schoenberg made popular). It’s always difficult to program with Pierrot, but I think this is pretty cool.

After Pierrot is a board meeting, a recording session, some Reich editing by email, a lot of Mackey memorization, and end-of-year admin and artistic meetings. And maybe some latkes. If we’re lucky.