Music in the Round - Pierrot Lunaire and more | Ensemble 360

One of Arnold Schoenberg’s most celebrated works, Pierrot Lunaire is a masterpiece of ground-breaking melodrama. The music, written for five instrumentalists and a reciter of Sprechstimme or ‘spoken-singing’, features poetry by Albert Giraud that explores an obsession with the wonders of moonlight.

Helen Grime, who curated the 2022 Sheffield Chamber Music Festival, took the same poems by Giraud as the starting point for her own brilliantly eccentric miniatures, while Brahms’s soul-searching trio is a sublime and celebratory work.

When Ensemble 360 performs Pierrot Lunaire, they’ll be joined by star soprano Claire Booth, whose many dramatic interpretations of Pierrot over the years have been lavished with praise. She’s become the go-to singer to take on this astonishing role, with her perfect understanding of the complex and ever-changing character of Pierrot’s obsession with the beauty of the moon. After a recent performance, The Guardian’s critic Andrew Clements was stunned by Claire’s ability to tread the line between cabaret and nightmarish extremes, but with her caricature staying just “on the right side of winsomeness”.