Sunday, March2, 2003  @ 7:00pm
Illsely Ball Nordstrom Hall at Benaroya Hall in downtown Seattle

Guest artists:
Meade Crane, piano
Alastair Willis, conductor
Beth Keusch, reciter (making her Seattle debut in place of Cyndia Seiden)

Arnold Schoenberg’s dazzling and enigmatic Pierrot Lunaire is featured in an evening of colorful 20th century theater and cinema classics. In 1912 Pierrot rocked the music world. Struggling between traditional tonality and twelve- tone music, Schoenberg proposed new ways of musical expression through gesture and atonality, developing a new singing technique, "sprechstimme," a dramatic vocalization between speech and song. Ninety years later, Pierrot is considered a pivotal work and must be heard with fresh musical ears. As a visual foil for the music, we screen two film classics, Luis Buñuel’s Le chien andalou and Joris Ivens’ Rain to the skillful scores of Martin Matalon’s Las ciete vidas de un gato and Hanns Eisler’s Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain.