Marking the climax of a year in which she has become “a one-woman campaign to celebrate Schoenberg’s 150th birthday” (The Times), the charismatic and versatile British soprano Claire Booth, “a remarkable and internationally-renowned singer and perfect for Schoenberg” (Planet Hugill) takes on what is perhaps Schoenberg’s most challenging work for a solo singer, the half-hour monodrama for soprano and orchestra Erwartung, op.17, making her debut with the legendary Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, under the baton of American conductor David Robertson. The performances take place on 14 and 15 November.
Composed in 1909, Erwartung was premiered in 1924 in Prague conducted by fellow composer (and Schoenberg’s brother-in-law Alexander Zemlinsky. Schoenberg described Erwartung, saying “the aim is to represent in slow motion everything that occurs during a single second of maximum spiritual excitement, stretching it out to half an hour.” The musicologist Charles Rosen has said that Erwartung, along with Berg’s Wozzeck and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring is among the “impregnable great monuments of modernism.”
2024 has seen Claire releasing two highly-acclaimed recordings to celebrate the composer’s 150th anniversary. With pianist Christopher Glynn she continued a cycle of projects focusing on the vocal and song repertoire of composers who are more widely-known for their orchestral or instrumental works, including Grieg, Percy Grainger and Mussorgsky. Expressionist Music: A Schoenberg Songbook on Orchid Classics pairs Schoenberg’s songs with eight of his own paintings taking its cue from the composer’s statement that “painting is the same to me as making music”.
In his 5 Star BBC Music Magazine review, Erik Levi writes, “Claire Booth and Christopher Glynn have come up with an ingenious way of presenting his music in the most accessible and vivid manner. Their solution is to create a kind of songbook focused around eight central themes that are directly related to some of the composer’s paintings. Adopting this approach enables Booth and Glynn to maximise the variety of musical expression explored in each of the themes with performances that respond vividly to all the twists and turns in Schoenberg’s complex and ever-changing musical armoury.”
Claire also teamed up with the acclaimed Ensemble360 to curate a recording focusing on musical responses to the character of Pierrot, centring on Schoenberg’s ground-breaking Pierrot Lunaire, for Onyx Classics, as well as touring the project to a variety of venues including the Oxford International Festival of Song and the Arnold Schoenberg Center in Vienna, “with seven fine instrumentalists (the Nash Ensemble), investing Schoenberg’s 21 movements with irony, nostalgia and even terror, and Claire Booth not just singing, speaking, purring, growling and hurling out the surreal texts but embodying their mercurial moods like a virtuoso mime” (The Times).
Paul Thomas writes in Musicweb International, “Claire Booth is entirely successful, managing to declaim the text in an incredibly engaging yet completely musical way. Adept at altering her voice to get the best out of the text. …It’s a role she truly inhabits, as one must, but at the same time maintains an incredible technical control over the material. No mean feat, but one which Claire Booth manages with great skill to bring this wonderfully weird and remarkable piece to life. This is a superb entry point, therefore, into Pierrot’s world for the uninitiated and also a rendition of Pierrot Lunaire which stands alongside classic accounts of the cycle by Christine Schäfer and Phyllis Bryn-Julson, and more recently the hugely extroverted Patricia Kopatchinskaja in her unique account from 2021.”
Highlights of the 2024/25 season include the premiere of Helen Grime’s Folk with BBC Scottish Symphony, Strauss’s Four Last Songs with Boston Philharmonic and appearances at Wigmore Hall in a solo recital Cabaret! with Jâms Coleman and concerts celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Nash Ensemble.
Photo: Sven Arnstein
