Wiener Festwochen: Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Ingo Metzmacher, Sofia Jernberg, Klangforum Wien - Pierrot Lunaire

At the invitation of the Wiener Festwochen, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, a choreographer of overwhelming images and fascinating details, is staging for the first time a work from the standard musical repertoire. A melodrama is how Arnold Schoenberg referred to the 21 poems from Albert Giraud’s cycle Pierrot lunaire, which he set to music in 1912. A commedia dell’arte figure – naive, curious, eccentric, lonely – staggers about a kaleidoscopic soundscape between speech and song, intimacy and expressivity, comedy and tragedy. Together with conductor and Schoenberg expert Ingo Metzmacher and experimental vocalist Sofia Jernberg, Freitas appropriates the iconic work of musical modernism for her unique visual adventures. All lust, all fever, always vital and always morbid – as it engages with Pierrot lunaire, Freitas’s choreographic idiom is a match made in heaven!