This long and interesting concert was structured around Schoenberg’s extraordinary setting of 21 poems by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud, Pierrot Lunaire. Composed in 1912, the work created such a sensation that Stravinsky went all the way from Paris to Berlin to hear it.
The revelation of this concert to me was that, yes, musicians, like audiences, have been starved of live performance opportunities for the last year, but that has given musicians plenty of time to practice, time that isn't always there during normal concert life for successful groups such as The Streeton Trio.
What a Pulse the acrobats exhibited! What unanimity, what complicity in their formation and deformation of their complex body structures!
The bewildering confusion between dream and reality begins before one takes one’s seat in the theatre. You have to negotiate a building site and enter the Adelaide Festival Theatre by a side entrance (how like slipping into dream that is!), and put on a mask, so that it seems that the audience is itself on stage.
At this moment in our cultural history, as Australia emerges gradually from the restrictions imposed because of Covid 19, each live concert is a particularly reviving and refreshing experience.
After a trying 5 day lockdown it was a relief to be among the few who could revel in the sublimely silly A-Z of Dance.