Camerata Pacifica Presents Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire Works by Gershwin, Weill, & Debussy

Celebrated German soprano Sarah Maria Sun, considered among the foremost interpreters of contemporary music, makes her Camerata Pacifica debut in a semi-staged performance of Schoenberg’s groundbreaking masterwork Pierrot Lunaire, February 7-13, 2025, at four Southern California locations.

The performances are Friday, February 7, 7:00 pm, at Santa Barbara’s Music Academy of the West; Sunday, February 9, 3:00 pm, at Thousand Oaks’ Janet and Ray Scherr Forum; Tuesday, February 11, 7:30 pm, at The Huntington’s Rothenberg Hall in San Marino; and February 13, 8:00 pm, at Zipper Hall in Downtown Los Angeles.

Schoenberg set Pierrot Lunaire, commissioned in 1921 by actress/singer Albertina Zena, to 21 poems by the Belgian Symbolist poet Albert Giraud. With this piece, the self-taught composer who early in his career served as the musical director in a cabaret, contributed substantially, to the development of a new form of musical expression in which the sound of a word is transformed into an animalistic portrayal of sensual and spiritual movement, making it as important as the word’s meaning.

Camerata Pacifica Executive Director Adrian Spence paints a vivid picture of the work, “From its cabaret roots immersed in the occultism and numerology of the turn of the century Vienna, Schoenberg’s Pierrot Luminaire is fantastic, beguiling, melodramatic, grotesque, humorous, and utterly amazing. To emphasize the dramatic nature of the wildly irreverent poetry it’s set to, we’ve created 21 different stage maps, one for each for the 21 poems, that include unique lighting designs and stage movement by the soprano and musicians that support the musical expression.”

The program also features Schoenberg’s earlier atonal work Little Piano Piece, Op. 19, No. 6, as well as musical gems familiar and less familiar by three other composers whose lives and work were inextricably linked with Schoeberg in the early 20^th century: Gershwin, Weill, and Debussy. They include Debussy’s Clair de Lune, Gershwin’s Prelude No. 2 in C Sharp Minor, and four Weill songs, among them “It Never Was You” from the musical Knickerbocker Holiday, later made into a film starring Nelson Eddy.

Lara Morciano’s virtuosic Embedded Tangles, composed in 2013 for flute and real-time electronics, opens the program with flutist extraordinaire Sébastian Jacot, who returns to Camerata Pacifica following his critically acclaimed West Coast recital debut with the international chamber collective last February.

Principal Cello Ani Aznavoorian, Principal Clarinet Jose Franch-Ballester, and Principal Piano Irina Zahharenkova are also joined by Jolente de Maeyer, one of Belgium’s leading violinists, who makes her Camerata Pacifica debut along with soprano Sarah Maria Sun.

For tickets ($75 at The Huntington, Music Academy of the West, and Zipper Hall; $91, including fees, at Janet and Ray Scherr Forum) and information, visit www.cameratapacifica.org.