Cleo Laine and Arnold Schönberg

I listened to Cleo Laine's performance of Pierrot Lunaire, the 1912 song cycle by Arnold Schönberg, whch was published as his Op. 21. I followed the score while listening through the playback and selecting the track divisions, thanks to IMSLP (the Petrucci Music Library), which has public-domain scores available for display and download. The score is a wonderful tool for dividing the tracks, especially in longer works that are less familiar. And the score helps reveal how accurately the performers relay the composer's intent.

Pierrot is scored for speaker-singer (Sprechstimme), piano, flute (or piccolo), clarinet (or bass clarinet), violin (or viola), and cello—page 32 is shown here.  The music is relatively complex, although seldom do all the instruments support the voice. Some portions are just one or two instruments with the speaker-singer. The speaker-singer is given a musical line that indicates the relative pitch of each syllable, and in only 6 locations is the line to be sung on exact pitches (pp 7, 9, 10, 14, 26, and 34 of the PDF).

You might think that "speaking" a vocal line would be easy. Cleo Laine proves that assumption wrong. She was 47 years old at the album release, but her performance has the wobbly support of an 80-year-old. (Perhaps she attempted to provide a vibrato to her speaking voice? If so, the affectation is not appropriate for this work.) Worse yet, she doesn't control very well the approximated pitch of the line as written. I suppose that some changes might be good for singing the text in English translation, but the excellent work by poet Cecil Gray takes special care to reproduce meter, line length, and line repetitions of the original. Laine's album was nominated for a Grammy in classical music that year, which perhaps proves that the Grammy Award is no less political and topical than an Academy Award.

The performances by The Nash Ensemble (Crayford, Marcia (vln, vla); van Kampen, Christopher (vc); Pearce, Judith (fl, picc); Pay, Antony (cl)) and Clifford Benson (pno), though, are top-notch. Unfortunately the producer, Ralph Mace for RCA/Red Seal, could have done better on the instrumentalists' behalf.

This recording is LRL1-5058, released in 1974.