York University: Roger Marsh's ‘Pierrot Lunaire’

Extract

There is something of the poisoned chalice about setting the Belgian poet Albert Giraud's Pierrot Lunaire, Rondels Bergamasques – if nothing more than by association to the all-too-famous Schoenberg Sprechgesang melodrama. As interpreters of Giraud's work (and often as compositional interlopers), we are conditioned to assume that we ought not to bathe in the same water as Schoenberg. And yet the Yorkshire-based composer Roger Marsh has succeeded in (re)making Pierrot as a living resource with a tremendous staged production of Giraud's complete and enigmatic torrent of fantasy.