Australian Music Centre | Breaking sound barriers

Event Details

Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire has been regarded as one of the great events of modern music since its sensational first performance in 1912; but its density and quickness of reference and allusion do not always communicate fully with an audience in a standard concert-hall performance. This performance furthers the strongly theatrical intentions of its composer by adding a dancer to mime the moods and gestures of Pierrot as universal, moon-struck clown, in company with special lighting and projection of words and images to go with the reciter-singer’s delivery of the decadent poetic texts and the dazzling brilliance of the instrumental writing. The Australian composer Barry Conyngham has written a companion work of theatrical potential in his Showboat Kalang, which evokes in altogether more affectionate style an older period of Sydney Harbour’s waterborne entertainment and the dances for which the showboat musicians, including the composer’s father, played on harbour cruises. Images and sounds combine with mime and spotlit dance movement in this mostly light-hearted, sometimes serious recollection of an earlier pleasure-loving harbour city.

Featured non-Australian music: Strauss, Schoenberg

Further information for this event is available online at the event's website or by phone on (02) 9385 4874 or by email to australia.ensemble@unsw.edu.au

Featured Australian Works

Featured artists

• Performer Australia Ensemble